Tag: Open Thread

Mar 05 2015

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Trevor Timm: Building backdoors into encryption isn’t only bad for China, Mr President

Want to know why forcing tech companies to build backdoors into encryption is a terrible idea? Look no further than President Obama’s stark criticism of China’s plan to do exactly that on Tuesday. If only he would tell the FBI and NSA the same thing.

In a stunningly short-sighted move, the FBI – and more recently the NSA – have been pushing for a new US law that would force tech companies like Apple and Google to hand over the encryption keys or build backdoors into their products and tools so the government would always have access to our communications. It was only a matter of time before other governments jumped on the bandwagon, and China wasted no time

As President Obama himself described to Reuters, China has proposed an expansive new “anti-terrorism” bill that “would essentially force all foreign companies, including US companies, to turn over to the Chinese government mechanisms where they can snoop and keep track of all the users of those services.” [..]

Bravo! Of course these are the exact arguments for why it would be a disaster for US government to force tech companies to do the same. (Somehow Obama left that part out.) in demanding the same from tech companies a few weeks ago.

Jed Lund: The Hillary Clinton email ‘scandal’ says more about us than about her ethics

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not use a government email account during her time in the administration. She didn’t have to, but she should have! The first part of that sentence should be the end of any potential scandal discussion; the second part should be the beginning of our discussion of how we feel about public records. But since we live in a far more useless world, we’re going to wind up doing this backwards.

It’s all happening again. It’s going to happen forever. The Clintons might have taken another shortcut and may be hoping their fans will bail them out; the Republican Party has furnished another disingenuous bit of likely non-scandal to a press corps that knows “Unethical Clintons!” stories draw a lot of eyeballs. People will, again, define a government ethics issue through the lens of fan advocacy.

Usually, Slate’s reflexively contrarian default stance isn’t useful, but in a world in which everyone is running after the Clintons and making ominous “boogieboogieboogie” noises, Josh Vorhees is helpful: no one can point to a specific law Clinton violated. The Obama administration’s public records law mandating a public email account was passed after the end of her Secretary of State tenure; the National Archives and Records Administration’s 2013 bulletin stating that “agency employees should not generally use personal email accounts to conduct official agency business” reads more like a suggestion and, again, post-dates Clinton’s time at State. The 2009 NARA guidelines that Politico’s Dylan Byers cites in his reporting may have been binding, but it also may have been satisfied by Clinton’s voluntarily handing in over 55,000 pages of private emails. And Michael Tomasky notes at the Daily Beast that the New York Times – which got a lot of mileage out of Whitewater – went to press with a piece heavy on emphasis and thin on concrete details for something that’s supposed to be a clear-cut ethics violation.

Eugene Robinson: Boehner’s Sorry Spectacle

House Speaker John Boehner needs to decide whether he wants to be remembered as an effective leader or a befuddled hack. So far, I’m afraid, it’s the latter.

Boehner’s performance last week was a series of comic pratfalls, culminating Friday in a stinging rebuke from the House Republicans he ostensibly leads. Boehner wasn’t asking for much: three weeks of funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which was hours from shutting down. He came away, humiliated, with just seven days’ worth of operating money for the agency charged with keeping Americans safe from terrorist attacks.

By any standard, the whole situation was beyond ridiculous. The government of the world’s leading military and economic power cannot be funded on a week-to-week basis. There was no earthly excuse for this sorry spectacle-and no one to blame but Boehner.

Robert Reich: Will the Democratic Nominee for 2016 Take on the Moneyed Interests?

It’s seed time for the 2016 presidential elections, when candidates try to figure out what they stand for and will run on.

One thing seems reasonably clear. The Democratic nominee for President, whoever she may be, will campaign on reviving the American middle class.

As will the Republican nominee — although the Republican nominee’s solution will almost certainly be warmed-over versions of George W. Bush’s “ownership society” and Mitt Romney’s “opportunity society,” both seeking to unleash the middle class’s entrepreneurial energies by reducing taxes and regulations.

That’s pretty much what we’ve heard from Republican hopefuls so far. As before, it will get us nowhere.

The Democratic nominee will just as surely call for easing the burdens on working parents through paid sick leave and paid family and medical leave, childcare, elder-care, a higher minimum wage, and perhaps also tax incentives for companies that share some of their profits with their employees.

All this is fine, but it won’t accomplish what’s really needed.

Scott Ritter: Bibi’s Blustery Blunder

On March 5, 1946, almost 69 years ago to the day, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave his famous “Iron Curtain” speech before an audience of thousands in Fulton, Missouri. Churchill was in Fulton at the invitation of Westminster College, where he spoke. He traveled there aboard a train, accompanied by President Harry Truman. In his speech, Churchill declared that “an Iron Curtain has descended across the [European] Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe… all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.”  [..]

On March 3, 2015, the serving Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, spoke before a joint session of the United States Congress about the existential threat to Israel and the world — including the United States — by what he termed Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Netanyahu was at the nation’s capital at the invitation of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ohio Republican John Boehner. Netanyahu, in a breech of protocol, had failed to consult the President of the United States, Barak Obama, about his visit. His appearance before the assembled elected political might of the United States Congress came little more than a week removed from a closely contested election in Israel where Netanyahu’s continued tenure as Prime Minister is anything but assured.

Netanyahu claims that his speech, which attacked a looming deal being negotiated by the United States, Russia, China, France, Great Britain and Germany with Iran over its nuclear program, was a wake-up call about a bad deal that would empower an out-of-control theocratic state sponsor of terrorism with a break-out capability to produce nuclear weapons. Netanyahu and his supporters claim he has a case. That may well be. But one cannot escape the highly politicized environment, both here in the United States and back in Israel, which surrounded his appearance before the United States Congress. The level of acrimony that exists between the White House and Netanyahu because of this speech is unprecedented in the history of these two nations. Winston Churchill left Fulton, Missouri in the company of President Harry Truman, arm in arm. Netanyahu leaves Washington, DC having received the cold shoulder from President Barak Obama, and the subject of acrimonious commentary from a White House that feels betrayed by an Israeli politician — not leader — who has hijacked American national security objectives for his own political use.

Mike Lux: The D.C. Centrists’ Straw Men

One of the tiredest clichés in all of American politics — and a favorite of D.C. “centrists” — is that economic populism is all about beating up on the rich and redistributing income instead of pursuing economic growth.

A note here before I get into the main point of this piece: In that sentence above I put “centrists” in quotation marks because in Washington, D.C., centrism seems to be about being in line with certain kinds of big-money special interests rather than supporting what the center of the country, in terms of voters, believes. D.C. centrists believe in cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits; not taxing Wall Street tycoons at the same levels as their secretaries; weakening regulations on the kinds of financial speculation that caused the 2008 financial panic; bailing out bankers when they get in trouble, and not prosecuting them when they break the law; and doing trade deals that have historically benefited mostly big business and created bigger trade deficits. Voters are in opposition to all those policies by very big numbers, so those positions certainly aren’t centrist to them, but that doesn’t seem to matter much to the insider D.C. “centrists.”

The latest exhibit appears in an article in The Hill, “Centrist Dems ready strike against Warren wing“: {..]

Mar 05 2015

On This Day In History March 5

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

March 5 is the 64th day of the year (65th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 301 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1770, a mob of angry colonists gathers at the Customs House in Boston and begins tossing snowballs and rocks at the lone British soldier guarding the building. The protesters opposed the occupation of their city by British troops, who were sent to Boston in 1768 to enforce unpopular taxation measures passed by a British parliament without direct American representation.

The Incident

The event began on King Street, today known as State Street, in the early evening of March 5, in front of Private Hugh White, a British sentry, as he stood duty outside the Custom house. A young wigmaker’s apprentice named Edward Gerrish called out to a British officer, Captain Lieutenant John Goldfinch, that Goldfinch had not paid the bill of Gerrish’s master. Goldfinch had in fact settled his account and ignored the insult. Gerrish departed, but returned a couple of hours later with companions. He continued his complaints, and the civilians began throwing rocks at Goldfinch. Gerrish exchanged insults with Private White, who left his post, challenged the boy, and struck him on the side of the head with a musket. As Gerrish cried in pain, one of his companions, Bartholomew Broaders, began to argue with White. This attracted a larger crowd.

As the evening progressed, the crowd grew larger and more boisterous. The mob grew in size and continued harassing Private White. As bells, which usually signified a fire, rang out from the surrounding steeples, the crowd of Bostonians grew larger and more threatening. Over fifty of the Bostonian townsmen gathered and provoked White and Goldfinch into fight. As the crowd began to get larger, the British soldiers realized that the situation was about to explode. Private White left his sentry box and retreated to the Custom House stairs with his back to a locked door. Nearby, from the Main Guard, the Officer of the Day, Captain Thomas Preston, watched this situation escalate and, according to his account, dispatched a non-commissioned officer and seven or eight soldiers of the 29th Regiment of Foot, with fixed bayonets, to relieve White. He and his subordinate, James Basset, followed soon afterward. Among these soldiers were Corporal William Wemms (apparently the non-commissioned officer mentioned in Preston’s report), Hugh Montgomery, John Carroll, James Hartigan, William McCauley, William Warren and Matthew Kilroy. As this relief column moved forward to the now empty sentry box, the crowd pressed around them. When they reached this point they loaded their muskets and joined with Private White at the custom house stairs. As the crowd, estimated at 300 to 400, pressed about them, they formed a semicircular perimeter.

The crowd continued to harass the soldiers and began to throw snow balls and other small objects at the soldiers. Private Hugh Montgomery was struck down onto the ground by a club wielded by Richard Holmes, a local tavernkeeper. When he recovered to his feet, he fired his musket, later admitting to one of his defense attorneys that he had yelled “Damn you, fire!” It is presumed that Captain Preston would not have told the soldiers to fire, as he was standing in front of the guns, between his men and the crowd of protesters. However, the protesters in the crowd were taunting the soldiers by yelling “Fire”. There was a pause of indefinite length; the soldiers then fired into the crowd. Their uneven bursts hit eleven men. Three Americans – ropemaker Samuel Gray, mariner James Caldwell, and a mixed race sailor named Crispus Attucks – died instantly. Seventeen-year-old Samuel Maverick, struck by a ricocheting musket ball at the back of the crowd, died a few hours later, in the early morning of the next day. Thirty-year-old Irish immigrant Patrick Carr died two weeks later. To keep the peace, the next day royal authorities agreed to remove all troops from the centre of town to a fort on Castle Island in Boston Harbor. On March 27 the soldiers, Captain Preston and four men who were in the Customs House and alleged to have fired shots, were indicted for murder.

The Trial of the Soldiers

At the request of Captain Preston and in the interest that the trial be fair, John Adams, a leading Boston Patriot and future President, took the case defending the British soldiers.

In the trial of the soldiers, which opened November 27, 1770, Adams argued that if the soldiers were endangered by the mob, which he called “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs,” they had the legal right to fight back, and so were innocent. If they were provoked but not endangered, he argued, they were at most guilty of manslaughter. The jury agreed with Adams and acquitted six of the soldiers. Two of the soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter because there was overwhelming evidence that they fired directly into the crowd, however Adams invoked Benefit of clergy in their favor: by proving to the judge that they could read by having them read aloud from the Bible, he had their punishment, which would have been a death sentence, reduced to branding of the thumb in open court. The jury’s decisions suggest that they believed the soldiers had felt threatened by the crowd. Patrick Carr, the fifth victim, corroborated this with a deathbed testimony delivered to his doctor.

Three years later in 1773, on the third anniversary of the incident, John Adams made this entry in his diary:

The Part I took in Defence of Cptn. Preston and the Soldiers, procured me Anxiety, and Obloquy enough. It was, however, one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country. Judgment of Death against those Soldiers would have been as foul a Stain upon this Country as the Executions of the Quakers or Witches, anciently. As the Evidence was, the Verdict of the Jury was exactly right.

“This however is no Reason why the Town should not call the Action of that Night a Massacre, nor is it any Argument in favour of the Governor or Minister, who caused them to be sent here. But it is the strongest Proofs of the Danger of Standing Armies.

Mar 04 2015

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Phyllis Bennis: Netanyahu Threatens War In Speech to Congress

This was a speech threatening war.

Realizing he has insufficient clout to stop the negotiations, Netanyahu demanded a back-up position: If not “no” deal, then we can have a better deal.

His vision of a “better” deal, however, is grounded in Iranian surrender. And since that is not going to happen, demanding it means abandoning diplomacy in favor of-yes, war.

Netanyahu threatened just such a war against Iran, in his statement “even if Israel stands alone, the Jewish people will not remain passive.”

The threat to nuclear non-proliferation in the Middle East was issued long ago-not by Iran, but by Israel’s own internationally known but carefully denied nuclear arsenal. It is Israel, not Iran, whose hundreds of nuclear weapons threaten a potential nuclear arms race in the region, threaten its neighbors, and threaten the world.

Zephyr Teachout: The Path to Freedom From Corruption Goes Through My State – And Your State

Our current problem isn’t bribery of voters, but legal bribery of candidates.

The system is rigged and broken. A small number of people have far too much political power in America. There is a clear way out, and it starts in the states.

In the past, quick anti-corruption reform has started in the states. Until the late 19th century, ballots were mostly public, leading to systematic bribery of voters. Secret ballots were the result of state-by-state reform movements in the 1880s and 1890s.

Our current problem isn’t bribery of voters, but legal bribery of candidates. Power flows from elections, and right now most elections rely exclusively on private funding by some of the wealthiest people in world history. That means most candidates – and therefore, leaders – have no choice but to become sycophants to their interests. The corruption in our elections corrupts all of our politics.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: The Koch Cash Behind the Latest Attack on Obamacare

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in King v. Burwell this Wednesday, and once again the fate of the Affordable Care Act will be in the nine justices’ hands. Unlike National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius, the 2012 case that affirmed the ACA’s individual mandate but gutted its expansion of Medicaid, King turns not on the act’s constitutionality but rather on an statutory issue variously described as “bordering on frivolous,” “nested in a fictional history of Congressional intent,” and “fluff.” But like the prior case, whose result effectively denied health insurance to half of the 17 million intended to have been covered by the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid, King, if decided against the government, could leave another 8.2 million uninsured and, effectively, send the ACA into its oft-cited “death spiral.” Naturally, the Kochs are pulling more than their fair share of strings.

The Kochs and their affiliated groups spent vast sums to try to stop the Affordable Care Act from passing in the first place; to unseat those that backed the law over the course of several election cycles; and more recently, to stymie the law’s implementation (e.g., killing Medicaid expansion in Tennessee last month). And the influence of the Koch network pervades nearly every part of the challengers’ case in King v. Burwell.

Jessica Valenti: College is too late to start teaching students about sexual assault

There are some essential life skills that high schools know they have to teach students. That’s why most offer classes like woodshop, home economics and drivers education. So I have to ask: Given that we’re keen to teach teenagers the basics they need to function in society, why do we still have no mandated education around rape?

Expecting high schoolers to fully grasp what sexual assault is without comprehensive education is ridiculous. Politicians still routinely demonstrate their ignorance around rape, the FBI only changed its outdated definition of sexual assault in 2011, and even the courts regularly muck up rape cases.

And while it’s wonderful that more and more universities are creating sexual assault orientations and mandating courses on consent, by the time young people reach college (assuming they go at all) it’s often too late. Nearly half of American teenagers are sexually active by the time they’re 17 years old and 44% of sexual assault victims are under 18 years old.

Keziyah Lewis: The people who could’ve prevented Tamir Rice’s death are the Cleveland police

Only in the flawed, racist, American justice system, could a black 12-year-old boy with a toy gun be blamed for his failure to prevent his own death.

But there wasn’t anything that Tamir Rice could have done to eliminate the possibility that he would die at the hands of a cop: there is a limit to how careful you can be when you live in a society designed to criminalize you. Rice’s identity as a young black male made him a potential police target from the day he was born. In the eyes of the justice system, which arrests, incarcerates, and executes black men and women at disproportionate rates compared to other races, he was always guilty of being a boy with dark skin. His punishment was just yet to be determined. [..]

If anyone could have exercised “due care to avoid injury” on that day, it was definitely not Tamir Rice. He had no control over the events that day because he had no control over his position in society as a young black male. The City of Cleveland defends officer Loehmann’s actions by claiming that, had Tamir and his family made different choices, the shooting could have been avoided. The truth is that Tamir was never given a chance – not by the Cleveland police on that cold November day, and certainly not by the society he lived in.

Rena Steinzor: Bad Feds, Deadly Meds

FDA must be equipped to regulate compounding pharmacies.

In December, the Department of Justice indicted 14 people who worked at the New England Compounding Center. The company manufactured drugs in insanitary conditions that produced a fungal meningitis outbreak that killed 64 people and made 751 gravely ill in 2012. One of the owners and a senior pharmacist face charges of racketeering and second-degree murder.

This small compounding company mixed (pdf) steroid injections in a so-called clean room where the air conditioning was shut down at night, technicians wore gloves with holes (pdf) in them and the ventilation system absorbed fragments from a recycling operation located nearby and owned by the same individuals. When employees complained about unsanitary conditions, managers said, “This line is worth more than all your lives combined, so don’t stop it.” Countless vials of the contaminated steroid drugs were shipped out to hospitals and other treatment centers in 20 states.

The indictments are good news. If convictions are obtained, they will serve as some deterrent to further misconduct within an industry that continues to be virtually unregulated.

Mar 04 2015

The Breakfast Club (Strutting Her Stuff)

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

photo 807561379_e6771a7c8e_zps7668d00e.jpg

This Day in History

Franklin D. Roosevelt sworn in as president, Ronald Reagan takes responsibility for the Iran-Contra affair, the AAA is born in 1904.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

We’ve collectively decided that putting kids in 3000 pounds of metal traveling at 65 MPH is safe, while letting them walk unsupervised can potentially get them taken away from you and placed in a foster situation. Also known to be safe.

ugh.

Atrios

Mar 04 2015

On This Day In History March 4

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

March 4 is the 63rd day of the year (64th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 302 days remaining until the end of the year.

In this day in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is inaugurated as the 32nd president of the United States. In his famous inaugural address, delivered outside the east wing of the U.S. Capitol, Roosevelt outlined his “New Deal”–an expansion of the federal government as an instrument of employment opportunity and welfare–and told Americans that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Although it was a rainy day in Washington, and gusts of rain blew over Roosevelt as he spoke, he delivered a speech that radiated optimism and competence, and a broad majority of Americans united behind their new president and his radical economic proposals to lead the nation out of the Great Depression.

The only American president elected to more than two terms, he forged a durable coalition that realigned American politics for decades. FDR defeated incumbent Republican Herbert Hoover in November 1932, at the depths of the Great Depression. FDR’s combination of optimism and activism contributed to reviving the national spirit. Working closely with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in leading the Allies against Germany and Japan in World War II, he died just as victory was in sight.

Starting in his “first hundred days” in office, which began March 4, 1933, Roosevelt launched major legislation and a profusion of executive orders that gave form to the New Deal, a complex, interlocking set of programs designed to produce relief (especially government jobs for the unemployed), recovery (of the economy), and reform (through regulation of Wall Street, banks and transportation). The economy improved rapidly from 1933 to 1937, but then went into a deep recession. The bipartisan Conservative Coalition that formed in 1937 prevented his packing the Supreme Court or passing much new legislation; it abolished many of the relief programs when unemployment practically ended during World War II. Most of the regulations on business were ended about 1975-85, except for the regulation of Wall Street by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which still exists. Along with several smaller programs, major surviving programs include the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which was created in 1933, and Social Security, which Congress passed in 1935.

As World War II loomed after 1938, with the Japanese invasion of China and the aggressions of Nazi Germany, FDR gave strong diplomatic and financial support to China and Britain, while remaining officially neutral. His goal was to make America the “Arsenal of Democracy” which would supply munitions to the Allies. In March 1941, Roosevelt, with Congressional approval, provided Lend-Lease aid to the countries fighting against Nazi Germany with Great Britain. He secured a near-unanimous declaration of war against Japan after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, calling it a “date which will live in infamy“. He supervised the mobilization of the US economy to support the Allied war effort. Unemployment dropped to 2%, relief programs largely ended, and the industrial economy grew rapidly to new heights as millions of people moved to new jobs in war centers, and 16 million men (and 300,000 women) were drafted or volunteered for military service.

Roosevelt dominated the American political scene, not only during the twelve years of his presidency, but for decades afterward. He orchestrated the realignment of voters that created the Fifth Party System. FDR’s New Deal Coalition united labor unions, big city machines, white ethnics, African Americans and rural white Southerners. Roosevelt’s diplomatic impact also resonated on the world stage long after his death, with the United Nations and Bretton Woods as examples of his administration’s wide-ranging impact. Roosevelt is consistently rated by scholars as one of the greatest U.S. Presidents.

Mar 03 2015

Cenk Uygur: MSNBC Not Left Wing. Never Was

Recently MSNBC announced that it was making major programming changes to counter its ratings slide. It cancelled two afternoon programs, “The Reid Report” and “The Ronan Farrow Daily” which were replaced by two hours of news programming hosted by Thomas Roberts. A source at MSNBC said that the goal was to “move away from left wing TV.” If anyone ever thought that MSNBC was “left wing TV” than they were paying attention. Three hours of disgraced Republican has-been Joe Scarborough and the other programming throughout the day and into prime time that spouted DNC talking points is not left wing. Never was. And that is why MSNBC is falling in its ratings, as the left wing host of Young Turks, Cenk Uygur, points out he has two million viewers every day.

Maybe, MSNBC should hire Cenk and get Keith Olbermann back and fire Joe Scarborough who is more suited for Fox News.

Mar 03 2015

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Dean Baker: Signs of intelligent life in the economics profession

Larry Summers and other top economists finally reject the orthodoxy of the past 20 years

Last month, Larry Summers ripped into those arguing that more education is the answer to the country’s rampant inequality.

“The core problem is that there aren’t enough jobs,” said the former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton and top economics adviser to Barack Obama. “If you help some people, you could help them get the jobs, but then someone else won’t get the jobs. Unless you’re doing things that have things that are affecting the demand for jobs, you’re helping people win a race to get a finite number of jobs.”

He made these comments at a conference at the Brookings Institution put on by the Hamilton Project, the economics think tank funded by Summers’ predecessor at the Clinton Treasury, Robert Rubin.

If the significance of these comments is not clear, the most important economic figure of the Democratic Party mainstream was demolishing one of the party’s central themes over the last two decades. Summers was arguing that the problems of the labor force – weak employment opportunities, stagnant wages and rising inequality – were not going to be addressed by increasing the education and skills of the workforce. Rather, the problem was the overall state of the economy.

David Cay Johnston: Financiers and power producers rig electricity markets

Sleepy regulators in New England allow consumers to be robbed of billions of dollars

For decades Wall Street financial engineers, teaming up with electric power producers, have gamed wholesale electricity auctions to earn bigger profits than either a regulated utility or a competitive market would yield. This month they made a major advance in their campaign to get rich by subtly draining your wallet. Yet every major news organization ignored this.

This latest development took place in New England, which already has America’s most expensive electricity. February’s electricity auction saw the annual cost to customers rise to $4 billion, up from about $3 billion in last year’s auction and less than $2 billion in the 2013 auction. That $4 billion figure would have been much higher but for a rule capping prices.

By the way, that $4 billion is not for the electricity, which costs extra. The $4 billion price tag is for capacity payments made to owners just for promising to run their power plants in 2018 and ’19.

If that sounds bizarre, it’s because it is. It is comparable to government taxing us to pay auto dealers to keep enough cars and trucks on their lots to satisfy expected future demand.

Richard Eskow:

Frank Underwood is known for deceiving people into acting against their own best interests. (We’ll miss you, President Walker.) Now we learn that this trait may extend to the series that features him.

The greatest betrayals on “House of Cards” can be found in the misleading arguments, presented as “truth,” that suggest that cutting “entitlements” is a necessity and raising taxes isn’t even an option.

The fact that Netflix has insisted upon heavy tax breaks for filming the show in Maryland may be merely coincidental. Here’s what’s not: We have learned that the series hired a leading “new Democrat” (read, “corporate Democrat”) as a consultant for the show’s most misleading episode.

The audience loves watching Frank Underwood deceive other characters. It’s less likely to appreciate being deceived itself, especially as some real-life Frank Underwoods are launching an attack against the party’s populist wing.

Paul Buccheit: Four Reasons Young Americans Should Burn Their Student Loan Papers

Fifty years ago students burned their draft cards to protest an immoral war against the people of Vietnam. Today it’s a different kind of war, immoral in another way, waged against young Americans of approximately the same age, and threatening them in a manner that endangers not their lives but their livelihoods.

There are at least four good reasons why America’s young adults- and their parents-should take up the fight against financial firms who are holding high-interest student loans that total more than the nation’s credit card debt, and more than the total income of the poorer half of America. [..]

Progressives have no shortage of important causes, but an attack on predatory student loan policies could be a unifying force for us, particularly if the power of social networking is employed.

An Apple executive said, “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.” But almost the entirety of corporate profits are being spent on stock buybacks to enrich executives and shareholders, rather than on job training.

Mary Tirck: US sells prisoners to the highest bidders

Willacy strike highlights larger problems within the prison-industrial complex

On Feb. 20 prisoners at the Willacy County Correctional Center refused to work and eat breakfast, to protest inadequate medical care at the for-profit Texas tent prison. The situation soon escalated into a riot, with inmates setting fire to some of the tents and at least three injuries. Guards used tear gas to quell the uprising.

A day later, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) said the Willacy facility, which houses mostly undocumented immigrants – many held for illegal border crossing and low-level offenses – was uninhabitable and its 2,800 prisoners would be moved to other facilities.

The Willacy prison fiasco highlights the problems of privatizing prisons and prison services across the U.S. Instead of protecting their limited rights, state and federal governments are selling prisoners to the highest bidder.

Criminal alien requirement (CAR) prisons such as Willacy only magnify the routine abuses of private prisons. CAR prisons are almost entirely filled with low-security immigrant prisoners serving time before being deported. The overwhelmingly majority of Willacy prisoners were convicted only of illegal re-entry into the United States. Most of the other prisoners are there for low-level drug crimes.

John Nichols: Mr. Spock Was a McGovernite: Remembering Leonard Nimoy’s ‘Live Long and Prosper’ Politics

The tributes to Leonard Nimoy that have filled newspaper front pages and television broadcasts since his death Friday have begun to reveal a measure of the man’s remarkable reach, which extended far beyond his development of perhaps the most enduring and beloved character in modern science fiction.

He was a dedicated artist who acted on stage and screen, directed plays and films, wrote poetry and earned praise for his photography; a generous donor to the arts and many causes; a proud Screen Actors Guild- American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) member; and an early champion of diversity and pay equity-as was revealed in recent reports on how Mr. Spock advocated for equal pay for Lt. Uhura (actress Nichelle Nichols).

So perhaps it will not come as a surprise that, at the height of his initial fame, Nimoy was an ardent McGovern man.

Mar 03 2015

On This Day In History March 3

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

March 3 is the 62nd day of the year (63rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 303 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1887, Anne Sullivan begins teaching six-year-old Helen Keller, who lost her sight and hearing after a severe illness at the age of 19 months. Under Sullivan’s tutelage, including her pioneering “touch teaching” techniques, the previously uncontrollable Keller flourished, eventually graduating from college and becoming an international lecturer and activist. Sullivan, later dubbed “the miracle worker,” remained Keller’s interpreter and constant companion until the older woman’s death in 1936.

Sullivan, age 20, arrived at Ivy Green, the Keller family estate, in 1887 and began working to socialize her wild, stubborn student and teach her by spelling out words in Keller’s hand. Initially, the finger spelling meant nothing to Keller. However, a breakthrough occurred one day when Sullivan held one of Keller’s hands under water from a pump and spelled out “w-a-t-e-r” in Keller’s palm. Keller went on to learn how to read, write and speak. With Sullivan’s assistance, Keller attended Radcliffe College and graduated with honors in 1904.

Helen Keller became a public speaker and author; her first book, “The Story of My Life” was published in 1902. She was also a fundraiser for the American Foundation for the Blind and an advocate for racial and sexual equality, as well as socialism. From 1920 to 1924, Sullivan and Keller even formed a vaudeville act to educate the public and earn money. Helen Keller died on June 1, 1968, at her home in Westport, Connecticut, at age 87, leaving her mark on the world by helping to alter perceptions about the disabled.

Mar 02 2015

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

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Trevor Timm: The Isis war resolution debate resounds with doublespeak

We’re more than six months into an illegal war and hardly anyone in DC seems to care.

Congress continued to half-heartedly debate an ISIS war resolution this week, as the Senate held a hearing on the Obama administration’s proposed language for a three-year ISIS war that it belatedly wrote only a few weeks ago – after several months and thousands of bombs had been dropped in both Iraq and Syria. Sen. Bob Corker, meanwhile, says he his committee might get around to holding another hearing in a couple weeks. But he’s in no rush.

It’s hard to figure out who is more to blame for the embarrassing damage both branches of government are currently doing to both the War Powers Act and the Constitution: a Congress that is too cowardly to take a stand, or an administration that insists it doesn’t matter what Congress does, they’re going to keep bombing Iraq and Syria for years either way.

Christine Lagarde: Fair Play — Equal Laws for Equal Working Opportunities for Women

Leveling the legal playing field for women holds real promise for the world — in both human and economic terms. Unfortunately, that promise remains largely ignored and its potential untapped. In too many countries, too many legal restrictions conspire against women to be economically active to work.

What can be done to remove these barriers? A new study (pdf) done by IMF economists seeks to answer that question.

The bottom line? It’s about a fair, level playing field.

Despite some progress over the past few years, gender-based legal restrictions remain significant. Almost 90 percent of countries have at least one important restriction in the books, and some have many.

These range from the requirement for women to seek their husband’s permission to work, to laws that restrict women’s participation in specific professions. Others constrain the ability of women to own property, or to inherit, or to obtain a loan.

Paul Krugman: Walmart’s Visible Hand

A few days ago Walmart, America’s largest employer, announced that it will raise wages for half a million workers. For many of those workers the gains will be small, but the announcement is nonetheless a very big deal, for two reasons. First, there will be spillovers: Walmart is so big that its action will probably lead to raises for millions of workers employed by other companies. Second, and arguably far more important, is what Walmart’s move tells us – namely, that low wages are a political choice, and we can and should choose differently. [..]

But labor economists have long questioned this view. Soylent Green – I mean, the labor force – is people. And because workers are people, wages are not, in fact, like the price of butter, and how much workers are paid depends as much on social forces and political power as it does on simple supply and demand.

What’s the evidence? First, there is what actually happens when minimum wages are increased. Many states set minimum wages above the federal level, and we can look at what happens when a state raises its minimum while neighboring states do not. Does the wage-hiking state lose a large number of jobs? No – the overwhelming conclusion from studying these natural experiments is that moderate increases in the minimum wage have little or no negative effect on employment.

Charles M. Blow: CPAC: Hackneyed and Hollow

I never know how to set my expectations for the Conservative Political Action Conference, also known as CPAC.

I try to approach it with as much of an open mind as I can muster, understanding that I am at odds, fundamentally, with many conservative principles and conservatives’ views about the role, size and scope of government, but also realizing that apart from a debate setting, this may be the best place to take the temperature of, and hear from, the broadest range of conservative leaders.

I still think, perhaps naïvely so, that people can be ideologically opposed but intellectually engaged, that a good idea makes the best bridge.

So I do my best to follow the speeches – from afar (thank you, live streaming!) – and wait to hear something that jolts my consciousness or challenges my sense of things.

But once again this year, I was disappointed.

There remains in the Republican Party, as evidenced by the speakers at this event, a breathtaking narrowness of vision and deficit of creative thought.

Robert Kuttner: Is Hillary a Sure Thing in 2016?

You hear two competing stories about Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in 2016. According to the first, she has a lock on the nomination and the election.

Hillary is sure to win the nomination, because there are no other plausible candidates, especially if Elizabeth Warren doesn’t get in. And Clinton begins with a overwhelming money advantage.

She wins the election because the Electoral College gives Blue states something close to a majority even before the campaign starts. The Republicans would have to run the table of every possible state. But the Republicans are deeply divided, with the candidates who appeal to the base far to the right of the general electorate. And the GOP Congress is rapidly alienating most moderate voters.

Game, set, match to Hillary, correct? Well, not so fast.

John Limbert: Netanyahu’s supporters (and critics) don’t really care what he says to Congress

There is a remarkable parallel between denunciations of Binyamin Netanyahu’s March 3 speech to Congress and of a possible nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1. Those who condemn the former haven’t heard it; and those who condemn the latter haven’t seen it.

Of course the fights are not about the contents of either a possible nuclear agreement or a future Netanyahu speech. The Israeli Prime Minister could outdo Demosthenes in eloquence. It won’t matter, because the political symbolism of the event will overshadow his words. Likewise a nuclear agreement with Iran could be one of history’s most creative settlements between adversaries. To its opponents, however, that will not matter either.

What matters is the existence of a speech or a nuclear agreement, not their content. The fact that Iran and the P5+1 may negotiate their way to an arrangement in which both sides can claim achievements will represent to its opponents (both in Tehran and Washington) a disaster. When both sides see the other as infinitely duplicitous and dishonest, anything they agree to, must in some unfathomable way contain a trick to cheat US. How, the argument goes, can one reach any agreement “with such people”?

Mar 02 2015

On This Day In History March 2

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

March 2 is the 61st day of the year (62nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 304 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1836, the Republic of Texas declares its independence as in a nation from Mexico.

Formed as a break-away republic from Mexico by the Texas Revolution, the state claimed borders that encompassed an area that included all of the present U.S. state of Texas, as well as parts of present-day New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming based upon the Treaties of Velasco between the newly created Texas Republic and Mexico. The eastern boundary with the United States was defined by the Adams-Onís Treaty between the United States and Spain, in 1819. Its southern and western-most boundary with Mexico was under dispute throughout the existence of the Republic, with Texas claiming that the boundary was the Rio Grande, and Mexico claiming the Nueces River as the boundary. This dispute would later become a trigger for the Mexican-American War, after the annexation of Texas by the United States.

Establishment

The Republic of Texas was created from part of the Mexican state Coahuila y Tejas. Mexico was in turmoil as leaders attempted to determine an optimal form of government. In 1835, when President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna abolished the Constitution of 1824, granting himself enormous powers over the government, wary colonists in Texas began forming Committees of Correspondence and Safety. A central committee in San Felipe de Austin coordinated their activities. In the Mexican interior, several states revolted against the new centralist policies. The Texas Revolution officially began on October 2, 1835, in the Battle of Gonzales. Although the Texians originally fought for the reinstatement of the Constitution of 1824, by 1836 the aim of the war had changed. The Convention of 1836 declared independence on March 2, 1836, and officially formed the Republic of Texas.

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