In the wake of Attorney General Eric Holder’s resignation last week, a former Obama administration official made an incredible statement. The Washington Post reported that Jim Parrott, who advised the Obama White House on housing policy during the first term, said Holder’s “tough” enforcement actions on big banks harmed the economy, with the implication that his replacement should just back off.First of all, the idea that Eric Holder led a hard-charging onslaught against bank malfeasance is a fantasy. The Justice Department never led one top executive to jail for the mountain of fraud that caused the Great Recession, and much of the misconduct that was never fixed continues to this day. Big banks were so wounded by the DoJ crackdown that their stock prices rose whenever they announced a settlement.Maybe Parrott’s current work, advising financial institutions on housing finance issues, fully explains his perspective. But it’s worth examining his assumptions, because they appear to be epidemic in Washington.Read More.Source: Salon/David Dayen
New Deal Liberalism Lives On
In the age of trickle-down economics and unrelenting attacks on the social safety net, there have been few greater champions of progressive values than Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who hosted his final Steak Fry this year as the senior senator from Iowa. Throughout his storied career, Harkin has remained a “prairie populist.” From his landmark Americans With Disabilities Act, to his principled vote against Clinton-era financial deregulation, to his recent sponsorship of the Fair Minimum Wage Act, Harkin has always been unapologetically loyal to the fundamental belief that government can—and should—play a role in improving people’s lives. And for Harkin, who proudly displayed his father’s Works Progress Administration card on his office wall, this brand of progressivism was deeply rooted in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal philosophy.Indeed, as Ken Burns’s remarkable fourteen-hour PBS documentary The Roosevelts reminds us, we are, in so many ways, living in a country shaped by FDR. “Maybe you know somebody who went to college on the GI Bill. Maybe you’ve flown out of LaGuardia Airport or through the Lincoln Tunnel. Or you can turn on a light switch and have power and build planes at Boeing,” Burns said recently. “That’s all Franklin Roosevelt.” Our modern debate on inequality mirrors “the central questions of Roosevelt’s day,” the filmmaker said in another interview. Burns also noted that Eleanor Roosevelt’s vital legacy of fighting for social justice remains especially relevant now. “She understood the issues of the day about health, about race, about women, about poverty, about immigration, all of the issues that we still grapple with today.”Read More.Source: The Nation/Katrina Vanden Heuvel
The real reason behind Rick Scott's infamous debate tantrum
There's enough posts here, including Rec diaries and a front page article, of the sheer stupidity of Rick Scott storming off a debate over a fan. Even the moderators called it "trivial" and "bizarre".To be clear, the rules said no electronic devices, which means tablets, iphones, or wired transmitters (ala Bush's first debate with Kerry). It does not mean items like a watch or, worse, a freaking FAN: items that do not transmit/receive information.Bottom line: after a ton of boos, along with a few good zingers Crist mocked him with, Rick Scott was shamed into coming out.Even more bizarre than refusing to debate Crist over a fan was Rick Scott's bizarre response that he never did refuse to debate over a fan ---after he did just that.You really can't appreciate how awkward and unprepared Rick Scott was unless you watch this. If you don't have youtube, be thankful. It's painful to watch.Read More.Source: Daily Kos
Global Warming and Global Warring
NEW YORK, N.Y.—Hours after 400,000 people joined in the largest climate march in history, the United States began bombing Syria, starting yet another war. The Pentagon claims that the targets were military installations of the Islamic State, in Syria and Iraq, as well a newly revealed terrorist outfit, the Khorasan Group. President Barack Obama is again leading the way to war, while simultaneously failing to address our rapidly worsening climate. The world is beset with twin crises, inextricably linked: global warming and global warring. Solutions to both exist, but won’t be achieved by bombing.“In today’s wars, many more civilians are killed than soldiers; the seeds of future conflict are sown, economies are wrecked, civil societies torn asunder, refugees amassed, children scarred.” These words were spoken on Dec. 10, 2009, by that year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, President Barack Obama. Five years later, his pronouncement reads like a daily headline. The peace group Code Pink is calling on President Obama to return his Nobel medal.Read More.Source: Truthdig/Amy Goodman
How to Reclaim the American Dream from Dollar Democracy
In the 2012 elections, Congressional and Presidential candidates and their supporters raised and spent over $6.2 billion dollars. The bulk of this money came from the richest one- half of one percent of the US population. As Will Rogers said, “We have the best Congress money can buy”!Buying access to politicians with their big-money donations, super-rich individuals and lobbyists hired by big corporations, can walk into the offices of Congresspersons to whom they donated, and ask for favors such as huge tax cuts, tax loopholes and subsidies, deregulation, and other favors for their multinational corporations. As a result, our corporate-funded politicians often give the super-rich what they want and deny the American middle class and poor the equal opportunity we need: funding for small business growth, world-class public schools, affordable college tuition, high paying jobs, and universal health care.Corporate sponsored politicians gave corporations the stock option tax loophole, the off-shoring tax loophole, and the oil severance tax loophole, which have been used by Facebook, Apple, and Chevron to legally avoid millions and billions in taxes, while receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate welfare from the government. These politicians have also cut taxes overwhelmingly for the super wealthy, many of whom are their campaign donors.In my new book, Dollar Democracy: with Liberty and Justice for Some; How to Reclaim the American Dream for All, you’ll find out how millions of regular Americans were victimized by Dollar Democracy. Because politicians have taken the side of their wealthy donors, not the side of the American people, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle class is disappearing. Here are some of the outrageous results of this Dollar Democracy:Read More.Progressive Populist/Peter Mathews
Robert Reich: Harvard Business School is complicit in America’s widening inequality
No institution is more responsible for educating the CEOs of American corporations than Harvard Business School – inculcating in them a set of ideas and principles that have resulted in a pay gap between CEOs and ordinary workers that’s gone from 20-to-1 fifty years ago to almost 300-to-1 today.A survey, released on September 6, of 1,947 Harvard Business School alumni showed them far more hopeful about the future competitiveness of American firms than about the future of American workers.As the authors of the survey conclude, such a divergence is unsustainable. Without a large and growing middle class, Americans won’t have the purchasing power to keep U.S. corporations profitable, and global demand won’t fill the gap. Moreover, the widening gap eventually will lead to political and social instability. As the authors put it, “any leader with a long view understands that business has a profound stake in the prosperity of the average American.”Read More.Source: Salon/Robert Reich
What We Don't Know About Syrian Rebels Dwarfs What We Do
Posted: "First of all, I've vetted a number of them [Syrian Rebels], because I know them." - Senator John McCain, on CNN, explaining who is going to vet the Syrian moderates, before we send them weapons. Well, we can all relax now. Senator John McCain, who was wrong about Iraq, wrong about the surge in Iraq, wrong about the surge in Afghanistan, wrong about Libya, and wrong about most everything else pertaining to US security has "vetted" the Syrian rebels he now wants to send arms to. Of course, the last big vetting he did is now back home, watching Russia from her house.
Read More.Source: The Huffington Post/John Soltz
Economic Recovery Should Help Workers
McDonald’s has said that its franchisees are independent owner-operators who set their own policies. The restaurant leader has also said that it respects employees’ right to choose whether they want to unionize and that it offers “competitive pay based on the local marketplace and job level.”The business press — and the major stock averages — suggest that an economic recovery is well under way. That may be so, but it would be hard to convince most ordinary Americans. Though unemployment has declined, much of the gains derive from workers departing the labor market, thus not adding statistically to the unemployment rate. At the current pace it still seems unlikely that prosperity will trickle down to the working class and the poor. Just how far down the social ladder renewed prosperity will penetrate is likely to depend on two struggles, one public and the other carried on within one of our most insulated institutions, the Federal Reserve. In both cases, advocates of status quo draw on tired Economics 101 arguments.The most public struggle is the growing push by fast food workers for a wage boost to $15 per hour. McDonalds responds that it “offers competitive pay based on the local marketplace and job level. References to competition and the marketplace call to mind images of a local farmers’ market, with many farmers selling similar, well-known local crops. Ads, if present at all, take the form of a list of raw produce or baked goods and their prices. McDonald’s is one of the largest national corporations, biggest ad spenders, and largest employers-especially in many inner cities. The only perfect competition in the fast food industry is among the numerous workers competing for a relatively small number of jobs in a high unemployment environment. McDonald’s wage offer is hardly determined by some impersonal market. Within limits it can set the bounds of the market. The argument that setting a higher minimum wage for labor would force immediate unemployment is disingenuous. In addition, labor markets differ from other markets in one other way. Labor is a cost of production, but it is also a source of demand. Better pay for its workers might add to cost, but also puts more money in the hands of potential Big Mac consumers.Read More.Source: Progressive Populist/John Buell
Obamacare and Family Values: Parents Get to Stay Home With Children
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was pushed primarily as a way to extend health insurance coverage. This was and is an important goal.However another important aspect of the ACA is its impact on the labor market. The vast majority of people who are below Medicare age get their insurance through their job. This meant that tens of millions of people felt tied to a job because this was the only way they could get insurance for themselves and their families.A key feature of Obamacare is that by allowing people to get insurance through the exchanges, workers would no longer feel tied to their jobs in the same way. Workers that wanted to look for jobs that may be a better fit, or wanted to try to start their own business, or just hated their boss, could now take this step without worrying about losing insurance for themselves and their families.Read More.Source: Center For Economic And Policy Research/Dean Baker
Here's How Progressives Plan To Beat Back The GOP Tide
WASHINGTON -- One of the problems for progressive groups this election cycle is that there isn't an Elizabeth Warren or a Tammy Baldwin on the ballot.Fearing that core Democratic constituencies will stay home in a non-presidential election year, groups like MoveOn.org and Working America, the AFL-CIO's community affiliate, are looking for creative ways to turn out the vote -- even though the candidates on the ballot don't carry the same progressive luster as Warren and Baldwin."How do you encourage a discouraged electorate?" Karen Nussbaum, Working America's executive director, asked at a press briefing last week."It's a matter of reaching these folks," she said, explaining that the organization has set a goal of reaching 1.5 million households -- or 2.5 million voters -- by Nov. 4. The group plans to hold 25,000 face-to-face conversations with voters every week until then.Given Working America's focus on economic issues, many of which appeal to voters across the political spectrum, the group's leaders believe they are "uniquely positioned" to reach "unexpected constituencies" like older, male and white voters. Twenty-five percent of its members identify as Republican.As part of this effort, roughly 400 Working America canvassers will go door-to-door between now and Election Day to talk to voters, with instructions to steer the conversation away from disapproval of President Barack Obama toward more local economic issues. The group's rationale is that while white, working-class males might remain agitated with Obama, they could nonetheless be persuaded on economic grounds to vote for Democrats in key races, like Mark Schauer, who is running against Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R), or Alison Lundergan Grimes, who is challenging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).AFL-CIO Political Director Michael Podhorzer said that the Republican Party is all about "feeding red meat to their base," and has "succeeded in agitating" voters. But his group believes that by talking with voters "about how they're going to pay their gas bills or rent, how they're going to get by," they will understand how voting for a Republican incumbent will lead to "more of the same."Read More.Source: Uncova...From The Huffington Post/Samantha Lachman
Shareholders' Quest for More Transparency
If you own a share of a company, how much information about the company are you entitled to? That is the question embedded in the debate over a proposed Securities and Exchange Commission rule that would force publicly traded companies to disclose their political spending to their shareholders.As of this month, a 2011 petition to the SEC proposing the rule has received more than 1 million comments — most of them in favor of the mandate. Supporters of the rule, some of whom demonstrated outside the SEC last week, say that's the highest number of public comments ever submitted in response to a petition for a SEC rule. That level of public engagement, the proponents say, means the agency must stop delaying and implement the proposal. They also say that as hundreds of millions of dollars flood into politics through anonymous "dark money" sources, the rule is more needed than ever.If adopted, the proposal, written by law professors, would codify and standardize disclosures shareholders have long been requesting from various companies. Those requests have been among the most common proposals at annual shareholder meetings. At the same time, major institutional investors
such as the New York state and city pension funds have used their shares to press companies to disclose their political expenditures.Read More.Source: Creators.Com/David Sirota
This Election Puts Women in the Driver’s Seat
Let’s be clear. As the majority of the population, the majority of registered voters, and the majority of those who actually show up at the polls, women can determine the outcome of any election.In a year when abortion restrictions were piled on at the state level, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations can deny employees birth control coverage, and equal pay legislation was stymied in the Senate by a Republican filibuster, this demographic reality could boost female Democratic candidates and spell trouble for Republicans up and down the tickets.
Female voters could tip the balance for Democrats in several high-profile Senate races that Republicans are counting on to take back the majority. Michelle Nunn, running in Georgia as a moderate who can mend fences, has a commanding lead with women (polls show that women favor her over GOP opponent David Perdue by a 52 percent to 34 percent margin) and could flip the seat being vacated by Republican Saxby Chambliss.Read More.Source: Otherwords/Martha Burk
The Magical President doesn’t exist: What the left must really do to defeat the wingnuts
Labor Day marks the traditional kickoff to election season, and all Democrats can say for themselves about the coming midterms is: Things look bad, but they could be worse. Republicans will almost certainly gain Senate seats, and could very well take it over, though their chances diminish every time we hear new audio of Mitch McConnell and his GOP cronies sucking up to the Koch brothers at their last retreat. But traditional low midterm Democratic turnout could make McConnell the Senate majority leader in January nonetheless.This political season opens against a backdrop of profound pessimism, captured in an August Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll that found that 71 percent of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. The president’s approval rating is at an all-time low, but so is that of congressional Republicans. Even worse, the two big stories dominating the end-of-summer headlines – the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. and the rise of ISIL – only deepen the political gloom, because they reflect two enormous American problems that are coming to seem almost unsolvable: profound and persistent racial injustice, and the shape-shifting chaos that is Iraq.These problems are particularly vexing for people who subscribe to the Magical President theory of politics — which includes too many of us, including me sometimes – because those are two issues Americans thought we’d “solved,” or at least responsibly addressed, by electing our first black president, who’d famously opposed the “dumb” Iraq war and promised to end it. Now race relations are arguably worse than when Obama took office, and so is Iraq, and this is a rare case where you can fairly say people on “both sides” blame the president — mostly wrongly.Read More.Source: Salon/Joan Walsh
A Prescription for Treating Runaway CEO Pay
You’ve surely heard many things about the Affordable Care Act, including the website headaches that embarrassed the Obama administration during the new program’s rollout.But you probably didn’t realize that when you pay your premium today, you can rest assured that it’s paying for health care and not a CEO’s new yacht. You can thank the way ACA treats CEOs — and other executives — in the health care industry for that.
When lawmakers debated this landmark legislation, some members of Congress worried that it might produce a bonanza for health insurers by delivering millions of new customers to them practically overnight. Who would hold those companies accountable as all this new cash rolled into their coffers?Read More.Source: Institute For Policy Studies/By , .
Labor Day Victories to Celebrate
In recent decades the news for the country’s workers and the labor movement has been mostly bad. We’ve seen stagnant wages, declining unionization rates, anti-union court rulings, and for the last six years mass unemployment as the labor market is still far from recovering from the collapse of the housing bubble. It would be easy to go on about how bad things are, but it is worth highlighting a couple of good news items against this backdrop.First, there was the victory of the workers at Market Basket, the Boston based grocery store chain. This was far from a normal labor action. It involved most of the workers, and most of the managers, uniting to bring back Arthur T. Demoulas as CEO of the company, after he had been fired in a coup engineered by his cousin Arthur S. Demoulas. Workers supported Arthur T. because he had a policy of paying decent wages and providing good benefits. His cousin was looking to trim costs to ready the firm for a private equity buyout.Read More.Source: Truthout/Dean Baker
Defeat of California initiative would protect insurers' profits
For the next two months, Californians will to be subjected to a barrage of TV, radio and online ads, which, ironically, they unknowingly will be paying for with their health insurance premiums.The ads are a part of a multi-pronged, multimillion dollar campaign — developed by public relations, advertising firms and political consultants for the state’s biggest insurers — to convince voters that an initiative on the Nov. 4 ballot designed to protect them against unreasonable rate increases will actually cause their premiums to go up.As of last week, a small handful of health insurers had contributed tens of millions of dollars to an organization called Californians Against Higher Health Care Costs. If you think the companies’ CEOs opened their personal checkbooks to finance that group’s work, think again. It is their customers that are paying for the propaganda campaign.Read More.Source: The Center For Public Integrity/Wendell Potter
1 Percent's Long Con, Featuring Jim Cramer and the Tea Party
A few years ago, Eric Cantor used the Labor Day holiday as one more occasion to celebrate business owners. To a lot of people, that sounded crazy. But in truth, it came straight out of the bull-market ideology of the 1990s, a time when the nation came to believe that trading stocks was something that people in small towns did better than slicksters in New York, and when Wired magazine declared, in one of its many frenzied manifestoes, that “The rich, the former leisure class, are becoming the new overworked” and that “those who used to Americans said back then, and the most fundamental novelty of the age was an idea: that markets were the truest expression of the will of be considered the working class are becoming the new leisure class.”We were living in a “New Economy,” the people. Of course the Beardstown Ladies were better at investing than the Wall Street pros; they were closer to the humble populist essence of markets. Of course the Millionaire Next Door was an average Joe who never showed off; that’s the kind of person on whom markets smile. And of course bosses were the new labor movement, leading us in the march toward a luminous economic democracy.Ugh. I got so sick of the stuff that I wrote a whole book on it: “One Market Under God,” which was published by Doubleday just as the whole thing came to a crashing end. Here is an excerpt.The Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed the 10,000 mark in March of 1999, a figure so incomprehensibly great that it was anyone’s guess what it signified. The leaders of American opinion reacted as though we had achieved some heroic national goal, as though, through some colossal feat of collective optimism, we had entered at long last into the promised land of riches for all. On television, the rounds of triumphal self-congratulation paused for a nasty rebuke to the very idea of financial authority brought to you by the online brokerage E*Trade, a company that had prospered as magnificently as anyone from the record-breaking run-up: “Your investments helped pay for this dream house,” declared a snide voice-over. “Unfortunately, it belongs to your broker.” And behold: There was the scoundrel himself, dressed in a fine suit and climbing out of a Rolls Royce with a haughty-looking woman on his arm. Go ahead and believe it, this sponsor cajoled: Wall Street is just as corrupt, as elitist, and as contemptuous toward its clients as you’ve always suspected. There should be no intermediaries between you and the national ATM machine in downtown Manhattan. You needed to plug yourself in directly to the source of the millions, invert the hierarchy of financial authority once and for all. “Now the power is in your hands.”Read More.Source: The Progressive Populist/THOMAS FRANK
Review 'This Changes Everything' tackles warming
Cutting the vast amounts of man-made pollution that feed global warming is an enormous challenge for societies that gobble up coal, oil and gas. But in “This Changes Everything,” Naomi Klein argues that those fuels aren’t the root problem — capitalism is. That message is likely to motivate fans of Klein’s earlier books, such as “No Logo” and “The Shock Doctrine,” but it also leads to a tough question.Is blaming capitalism for climate change just rhetorical hot air — or a brutal and uncomfortable truth?Whatever side you take, Klein deserves credit for not sugarcoating the problem. She writes that limiting global warming won’t be quick, easy or without disruptions, yet holds out hope that the end result will be better for people, the environment and even the economy. But make no mistake: “This Changes Everything” argues that we don’t just have to cut carbon pollution. We have to change society, and our own lifestyles. Klein writes: “Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war.”Read More.Source: Kevin Begos, Associated Press
State: White House didn’t drop the ball on ISIS threat
The Obama administration didn't overlook the threat posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki insisted Monday."Absolutely not," Psaki told MSNBC, saying the administration had "long been tracking this."Psaki spoke amid a brewing controversy over President Obama's assertion during an interview with "60 Minutes" on Sunday that the U.S. intelligence community underestimated the terror network's rise."That's absolutely true," Obama said. “Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria."Republicans have seized on the comment, saying the president should not have been surprised by the rise of ISIS."We predicted this and watched it," Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on CNN earlier Monday. "It was like watching a train wreck and warning every step of the way that this was happening. ... This here idea that somehow we didn't know that this was happening, of course we knew it."But Psaki said there was a difference "between being aware of a threat and seeing the level the threat poses." She suggested the president was saying that the U.S. misjudged Iraq's ability to respond to ISIS, rather than the danger posed by the group.Read More.Source: The Hill/Justin Sink
Oil company cuts ties with ALEC
International oil and natural gas company, Occidental Petroleum, is severing its ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the latest in an exodus from the conservative group. In a letter to an investment management company, Walden Asset Management, Occidental said it would no longer be a member of ALEC, or support the group. “There are no plans to continue Occidental’s membership in, or make further payments to ALEC,” Occidental said in a letter sent to the management firm on Friday. Occidental is the latest in a string of companies to drop support of ALEC, the majority of which were technology giants. Last week, Google said it cut ties because of ALEC’s climate change skepticism, saying the group was “literally lying” about global warming.Read More.Source: The Hill/Laura Barron-Lopez