If you listen to the media mostly on the right, but some on the left, by this point in the administration of President Barack Obama, we should be in a Road Warrior-like hellscape of crushing debt, death panels sending us off to concentration camp ovens and calling it "medicine," riots in the streets over the confiscation of guns, surveillance nano-drones entering our rectums in order to hear what our brains are thinking, undocumented Mexicans with Ebola or terrorist ties or huge calf muscles torturing cops all along the border before suicide bombing our malls and infecting our babies, and Christians being whipped in their homes by ululating Muslims who force them to kiss the Koran or face being beheaded, all while our Negro dictator and his transgender wife laugh with their Negro cabal and Wall Street cronies about the misery of everyone who fraudulently voted for them. And that's without getting deep into Crazyville with conspiracy theories of a rogue regime engaged in constant false flag operations in order to impose greater control over the population (how ya doin', Naomi Wolf?) or whatever the hell Alex Jones or Dinesh D'Souza are spewing about today.Read More.Source: The Rude Pundit, Lee Papa
Here we go again: The media starts pushing the “moderate GOP” myth
After blowing what at first looked like two can’t-miss opportunities in 2012 and 2010, the Republican Party was finally able on Tuesday to win back control of the U.S. Senate. Riding a wave of conservative anger (which, thanks in part to liberal apathy, flowed mostly unimpeded), the GOP almost had a clean sweep in its Senate campaigns, while also expanding its majority in the House of Representatives. And while many factors contributed to Republicans’ dominance, a new report from the New York Times suggests that it’s the Republican Party’s establishment wing — and its obsession with fielding more media-savvy candidates — that Democrats should look to if they’re searching for someone to blame.
To be clear, GOP leadership at the national level, especially in the Senate, did a damn fine job of avoiding most of the mistakes made during the last two federal elections. Future Senate majority leader and longtime top GOP strategist Mitch McConnell deserves all the right-wing hosannahs coming his way. But as the media continues to sing McConnell’s praises, let’s hope that it does so with a clear understanding of how and why he succeeded. Contrary to what we’re no doubt going to hear from some fuzzy-headed pundits, it wasn’t because he helped establishment-friendly moderates defeat Tea Party radicals in the primaries. It was because he sidestepped the GOP civil war entirely, focusing on style over substance and making sure every GOP nominee was marketable and media savvy.Read More.Source: Salon, Elias Isquith
Get Ready for the Real Fight to Come
Debacle. Bloodbath. Call it what you will. Democrats, as expected, fared poorly in red states in an off-year election. Worse, unpopular Republican governors survived. This was ugly.Yes, the electorate was as skewed as was the map. Many Republicans won office with the support of less than 20 percent of the eligible voters. Voters over 60 made up a stunning 37 percent of the electorate (up from 25 percent in 2012 or 32 percent in the last bi-election in 2010). Voters under 30 were only 12 percent of the electorate, down from 19 percent in 2012. Democrats won women, but lost white men big. Republicans lost ground with Hispanic voters, but in most of the contested states, they weren’t much of a factor.The election was fundamentally about frustration with a recovery that most people haven’t enjoyed. Hysteria about ISIS and Ebola didn’t help, but wasn’t the central source of frustration. The Republican theme was to blame President Obama and tie Democrats to him, arousing their base. Democrats chose not to run nationally against Republican obstruction, assuming that technique and right-wing social reaction would mobilize their base.Read More.Source: OurFuture.Org, Robert Borosage
In legalization battles, alcohol defines the politics of marijuana
When Colorado voters in 2012 approved a ballot measure legalizing marijuana, the state not only broke new ground in the ongoing battle over narcotics policy, it also validated an innovative new political message - one that compares cannabis to alcohol. Two years later, that comparison is being deployed in key marijuana-related elections throughout the country, and drug reform advocates are so sure marijuana is safer than alcohol, they are now challenging police to a "drug duel" to prove their point.
The proposal for the duel from David Boyer, an official with the Marijuana Policy Project, came after South Portland Police Chief Edward Googins announced his opposition to a municipal referendum to legalize marijuana possession."Claims that marijuana is safer than alcohol are so bogus it's not even funny," Googins told a local newspaper.Read More.Source: The Oregonian, David Sirota
The 0.01 Percent’s ‘I Reap All’ Accounts
Do you remember when Mitt Romney’s IRA made headlines during his failed 2012 presidential campaign?That outsized retirement stash estimated at between $20 and $102 million probably led President Barack Obama to propose limiting the buildup of IRA values. It turns out that Romney’s gigantic IRA was no fluke.At least 9,000 wealthy Americans have amassed $5 million-plus sized IRAs. Indeed, the former Massachusetts governor’s use of a monster IRA to defer taxation is modest compared to others.Read More.Source: Otherwords, Bob Lord
Midterm Outcome: Mandate On Obama Or Big Money At Play?
Look at it this way: at least the 2014 midterm elections are over.Maybe the most clueless pronouncement ever made by a U.S. Supreme Court Justice was Anthony Kennedy’s comment in the 2010 Citizens United case arguing that unlimited “independent [campaign] expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”Not even secret donations by free-range tycoons hiding behind fake “charitable” groups with names like Citizens for Cute Kitten Videos. Because when Scrooge McDuck dumps a truckload of bullion into a political campaign, it’s not because he wants anything in return. It’s all about the public good.Also, the justices ruled, because money is a form of speech. Scrooge needn’t even disclose spending $50 million on TV ads claiming that a candidate seeking to prevent McDuck Industries from dumping liquid cyanide into backyard swimming pools has a hidden history of torturing kittens.Read More.Source: The National Memo, Gene Lyons
Democrats Shouldn’t Run From Barack Obama’s Record
If I were running for office this November I'd be sure to make it clear that a vote for me is a vote for President Obama.He has done a good (but not perfect) job over the last 6 years. Notwithstanding, his critics choose to blame him for anything that goes wrong in our country. This approach is like criticizing Eisenhower for some things that didn't go well during the invasion of France on D-Day during WW2.Today and over recent years the US has had possibly the strongest economy in the West or possibly in the world. We've had a low inflation rate, a rising stock market and a major reduction in unemployment. This in spite of the fact that over the last decade or so globalization has inevitably moved millions of jobs overseas and State and Federal budget controls have cut civil service jobs.We have not become involved in any new wars. We have been able to eliminate Assad's chemical weapons without the risk of starting a war with Syria. The situation in Ukraine has begun to be constructively negotiated between Russia and the government in Kiev, without our military involvement. Hopefully a new era of peace has settled in between Israel and the Palestinians, based upon some reasonable concessions and compromises on both sides. There continues to be slow, but steady negotiations with Iran aimed at limiting Iran's nuclear weapons capacity. Osama bin Laden is no longer a threat, that being accomplished by careful planning and intelligence sources, and, importantly, without Pakistan's prior knowledge, which was essential. Obama has pulled together a coalition of countries to work at controlling and ultimately removing the ISIS control of much of Iraq, although it's almost universally understood that this effort will take many years to accomplish. His foreign policies have not been without fault, but considering all the possible outcomes Obama has steered a careful course.Read More.Source: The Progressive Populist, Letters To The EditorWallace WolffSouderton, Pa.
Dems Need Populist Pitch
Give the Republicans this: They did a much better job of focusing the rage of the American electorate than Democrats did. Republicans have succeeded in their strategy of blocking President Obama at every turn, and then blaming him for not accomplishing his goals.The conspiracy started on the night of Obama’s inauguration, Jan. 20, 2009, when 15 GOP leaders met in the upscale Caucus Rooom in Washington, D.C., at the invitation of Republican strategist Frank Luntz. They agreed to obstruct the new President, regardless of the impact on the nation, in the hope that gridlock would tarnish Obama and sabotage his re-election.Despite the precarious condition of the nation’s economy in the first two years, Republicans opposed Obama on the stimulus; they opposed him on rescuing General Motors and Chrysler; they opposed him on developing a national health reform bill, even though it was based on a Republican proposal; they opposed Obama on reforming Wall Street. And the obstruction worked! Even as the economy began to stabilize, Republicans complained that the economy wasn’t improving fast enough, despite their almost unanimous opposition to the measures designed to save jobs and stimulate business, and they won control of the House in 2010.Since then the Republican House has blocked virtually every Obama initiative, but the economy has continued to improve from the stimulus that Democrats passed during the first two years of his term, and Obama managed to win re-election in 2012. His approval rating has dropped to the low-to-mid 40s in the process, about the same as the Democrats, who had 42.2% approval going into the midterm election, but Republicans have become even more unpopular, with a 36.2% favorable rating going into the election. That makes the Republican sales job in this election all the more remarkable.Read More.Source: The Progressive Populist, Editor James M. Cullen
GOP Faces Tougher Battle Ground in 2016
Republicans had the best possible playing field in 2014 and massive amounts of outside money from secret donors to help them regain control of the Senate.
By ROBERT CREAMER
It was certainly a tough night for Democrats. But if the GOP believes it has a mandate for the Tea Party agenda, it is sadly mistaken. Most Americans strongly support a progressive middle-class-first agenda. And most important, with the mid-term elections behind us, the 2016 political battlefield completely transforms the political high ground.With the loss of the Senate and Republicans continuing to control the House, Democrats and progressives need to dig in for an epic battle with the Tea Party and the billionaires that are now in control of the Republican Party.One bright spot — State referenda to increase the minimum wage passed everywhere they were on the ballot and in local jurisdictions like San Francisco that increased the wage to $15 per hour.In the midterms the Republicans had the best possible battle ground — Democrats defending seats in mainly red states. Since the ratification of White House term limits, five out of the six two-term presidents have lost seats after re-election — an average of 29 in the House and six in the Senate, according to election analyst Charlie Cook.Read More.Source: The Progressive Populist
BRICS Might Shatter Global Economic Hegemony
The conclusion of the Sixth Summit of BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) in Brazil has rekindled the hope of change for many progressives who aspire for the righteous place for poor countries in the world community of nations.The grand inauguration of two institutions is a cause for celebration. A Contingency Reserve Arrangement (CRA), with an initial capitalization of $100 billion, will assist BRICS members in need of funds, and the New Development Bank (NDB), with a total authorized capital of $100 billion, is open to all members of the United Nations. By this endeavor, the BRICS became an economic alliance challenging the US- and European-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. Both new institutions, CRA and NDB, have the potential of breaking the global North’s stranglehold on finance and development. The BRICS Bank will be based in Shanghai, China’s financial hub, and it will be operational in about two years.However, different perceptions exist among the enthusiasts of these institutions. Asserting that the NDB would not to challenge the existing multilateral financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, Raghuram Rajan, the Governor of Reserve Bank of India, the central banking institution controlling the Indian Monetary Policy, said, “… but it certainly is saying, look, we have plenty of money ourselves, why don’t we put some of this money to use in a way that benefits us rather than necessarily depending on the multilateral institutions to change which is taking much more time than anybody thought of.” His rationale for the BRICS bank was that it could provide risk capital to long-term projects.This view represents the outlook of practical economist bureaucrats. Anyway, from the point of view of practical requirements of the developing nations, and from the long term perspectives on altering international economic relations as well, the formation of NDB will be a welcome development. One could hope that such regional institutions would help the developing countries to attain self-sufficiency by reducing their dependence on the big powers for economic assistance.It is now an established truth that the so-called Structural Adjustment Programs that the World Bank and IMF imposed upon their borrowers ruined the economies of poor and developing countries.Read More.Source: Populist.Com/N. Gunasekaran
Housing: A Common-Sense Prescription
“Healthcare” conjures up an arsenal of heavy-duty science: physician-specialists, super-duper medications, brave new world diagnostic imagery. The titles are intimidating: interventional radiologists, serotonin reuptake inhibitors, computerized tomography, bariatric surgery – all befitting complicated diseases. “Healthcare” swoops us into an arcane universe, where “clinical trials” will yield the wonder-interventions that will cure whatever ails our failing bodies.How simple! How misguided! Even as we swoop into the scientific paradigm of wellness, we abandon commonsense. What ails our bodies may lie in microbes, malformations, and bacteria; but compounding that may be quotidian human misery. And the solutions may lie in such “interventions” as better food, better family dynamics, better shelter – in short, better lives.An article in the Washington Post (Oct. 6) highlights the value of commonsense. Montefiore Hospital is one of 19 Pioneer Accountable Care Organizations (a pilot under the Affordable Care Act) that broadened their scope of “healthcare” to include community services. One Montefiore patient had undergone a bone marrow transplant, part of treatment for blood cancer. The operation was a success. But this patient was homeless, living in a shelter an hour away by public transportation from the hospital. Fortunately for him, Montefiore has a “housing unit,” with a skilled social worker, charged with finding apartments for homeless chronic patients. This case offers up no simple solution: the article makes clear that the patient would have to alter his lifestyle in exchange for the apartment. And a landlord would have to accept this patient. But the article also makes clear the consequence of homelessness: without a stable home, close to the hospital, the patient would probably not survive, even after a successful transplant.Read More.Source: Populist.Com/Joan Retsinas
Obamacare Is Making a Difference, But Here's What We Must Tackle Next
Although there is no shortage of critics of the Affordable Care Act -- on the far left as well as the right -- it's hard to dispute that the law has benefited millions of Americans. And not just those who have become newly insured over the past year.President Barack Obama cited some of the impressive statistics last Thursday, the day after the one-year anniversary of the turbulent debut of the Obamacare-created online health insurance exchanges."In just the last year, we've reduced the share of uninsured Americans by 26 percent," he said. "That means one in four uninsured Americans -- about 10 million people -- have gained the financial security of health insurance in less than one year."Approximately 8 million people were finally able to sign up for coverage on the exchanges after the many technical problems were fixed. Many others were able to enroll in health plans on private exchanges or by working directly with an insurance company or agent. As a consequence, the rate of uninsured Americans dropped from 21 percent in September 2013 to 16.3 percent this past April.Read More.Source: WN.Com/Wendell Potter
Why Economic Inequality Is Not a Bigger Political Issue
If critics of income inequality are wondering why the growing gap between rich and poor hasn't been a more potent political issue in the upcoming elections, a new study offers some answers: Americans grossly underestimate this inequality. That's one of the key findings of a survey showing the gap between CEO and average worker pay in America is more than 10 times larger than the typical American perceives.In the report, Harvard University and Chulalongkorn University researchers analyzed survey data from 40 countries about perceptions of pay gaps between rich and poor. In every country, respondents underestimated the size of the gap between CEO and average worker pay. In the United States, for example, the researchers found the median American respondent estimated that the ratio of CEO to worker income is about 30-to-1. In reality, the gap is more than 350-to-1.Read More.Source: Creators/David Sirota
“We hope they were duped”: How prosecutors gave banks the best “penalty” ever
Defenders of Eric Holder’s legacy on financial crimes keep saying that, although we sent no bankers to jail for their tsunami of fraudulent behavior, at least we punished the parent companies in settlements, and forced them to compensate victims. I call it “settlement justice,” and it has become the template for how the perpetrators of white-collar crime get treated in America.Usually, supporters of “settlement justice” tout the headline numbers ($37 billion!) and leave it at that. But it’s what happens after law enforcement signs the deal that matters. And one New Jersey lawyer’s detailed inquiry into a post-crisis settlement with Wells Fargo shows conclusively how banks wiggle out of their commitments, and why only prison cells can stop a Wall Street crime spree.The story concerns the “Pick-a-Pay” loan program, one of the more toxic mortgage offerings during the housing bubble. These loans offered a variety of different initial payment options for borrowers to choose: a sum corresponding to a 15- or 30-year fixed rate loan, an interest-only payment, or a minimum payment that created “negative amortization,” where the principal balance would actually increase with each passing month.Read More.Source: Salon/David Dayen
Eric Holder's heroic tenure
"In respect of civil rights," wrote Justice John Harlan, "all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful."Well, at least that's so on paper.In reality, it's not true for the penniless, for the working poor and transient, for those marginalized over skin color, religion, nationality, disability or sexual orientation.That is, unless people step up to make it true – people with innards of iron and hides titanium-tough, people like Eric Holder.I dare say Holder will go down as the most reviled attorney general in our history, and for one thing only: No one has ever so challenged power on behalf of the powerless.Read More.Source: John Young
Republicans Are In Corporations' Pockets On Tax Inversions
Last Week, the Obama Administration issued new regulations to limit corporate tax inversions. This maneuver, as our own Joan McCarter explained, is "the practice of corporations buying subsidiaries in foreign countries, then renouncing US citizenship to get out of paying US taxes." In other words, another scam by big money to stick the rest of us with the tax bill they should be paying. When Burger King announced plans for such a move last month, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said they'd "abandoned their country" and called for a boycott. Damn straight.Read More.Source: The Huffington Post/Ian Reifowitz
The False Promise of Technology
The bloom is off the rose. New technology, the force that was supposed to transform the world for the better (Remember the bridge to the 21st century?), has come up short. As is painfully obvious by now, the force is not with us.Proliferating digital gadgets — smart phones, smart watches, laptops, tablets, next-generation PCs — have become addictive ends in themselves, expensive status symbols for the young and the restless. More to the point, the information and communication overload thereby imparted (at the cost of shortened attention spans) consists increasingly of the drab, the superficial, and the brain-dead — celebrity news, promotional home movies, political propaganda, pornography, self-indulgent blogs, compulsive tweets, all delivered through websites and chat rooms of dubious repute and accompanied by an avalanche of commercial advertising.Throw in the fleeting headlines of the 24-hour news cycle, the interminable cellphone calls, the obsessive “selfies,” the habitual “gaming,” the videos of everything that moves, and what we have is cultural white noise and mind-numbing distraction to the nth degree. Marx was wrong; technology, not religion, is the opiate of the masses.If the end product of digitization is questionable, the means to the end, which was hailed as our economic salvation, has not lived up to expectations. Technology’s New Economy, born in Silicon Valley, was to have ushered in an unprecedented form of civilized and enlightened capitalism, whose captains of industry would be laid-back forty-somethings in khakis and sneakers with minds as open as their shirt collars. Informality and unstructured work environments would replace the top-down corporatism of the gray-flannel past; we would all live (and work) happily ever after in free-flowing, uncompetitive bliss.The reality is something else. Autocratically led tech companies have become notorious for seeking out cheap labor, looking overseas for “associates” willing to work for less and constantly lobbying for relaxed immigration rules allowing more foreign IT (information technology) workers to be admitted. Simultaneously, they downsize just as avidly as traditional employers to enhance their bottom lines.Read More.Source: Progressive Populist/Wayne O'Leary
Why The Economy Is Still Failing Most Americans
I was in Seattle, Washington, recently, to congratulate union and community organizers who helped Seattle enact the first $15 per hour minimum wage in the country.Other cities and states should follow Seattle’s example.Contrary to the dire predictions of opponents, the hike won’t cost Seattle jobs. In fact, it will put more money into the hands of low-wage workers who are likely to spend almost all of it in the vicinity. That will create jobs.Conservatives believe the economy functions better if the rich have more money and everyone else has less. But they’re wrong. It’s just the opposite.The real job creators are not CEOs or corporations or wealthy investors. The job creators are members of America’s vast middle class and the poor, whose purchases cause businesses to expand and invest.America’s wealthy are richer than they’ve ever been. Big corporations are sitting on more cash they know what to do with. Corporate profits are at record levels. CEO pay continues to soar.But the wealthy aren’t investing in new companies. Between 1980 and 2014, the rate of new business formation in the United States dropped by half, according to a Brookings study released in May.Read More.Source: Robert Reich.Org
Conservatives Have Little Use for Science
There’s a growing body of science distinguishing liberals from conservatives. While the most important study may still be “Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults” which appeared in Current Biology in 2011, there are two more recent studies, “Differences in Negativity Bias Underlie Variations in Political Ideology” from the June 2014 Behavioral and Brain Sciences and “Assortative Mating on Ideology Could Operate Through Olfactory Cues” published in the American Journal of Political Science in September 2014. That one says that liberals and conservatives smell different from each other, and prefer the smell of their own people.Other studies are more amusing, like Experian Marketing Services report that when it comes to fast food, the most liberal customers eat at Au Bon Pain. while conservatives opt for Schlotsky’s Deli and Whataburger. Similarly hunch.com (now owned by e-bay) reported that liberals prefer strawberry jam on their PBJ sandwiches while conservatives, by a margin of 19%, prefer grape.While the studies fail to provide an explanation of how we got this way, there is still a fairly consistent pattern – liberals are more inclined to accept new ideas, conservatives avoid anything new and different or even difficult to understand (“Political Ideology, Exploration of Novel Stimuli, and Attitude Formation” from the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2009) That pattern repeats itself over many studies.Read More.Source: Progressive Populist/Sam UretskySince the underlying function of all animals is simply species survival, both attitudes are useful. Liberals are ultimately responsible for the expansion of the human race into new regions, finding which foods are safe to eat, which animal species can be domesticated, and that it’s possible to live in New England if you wear a winter coat, but it was conservatives who came along later, and learned from the liberals’ experiments, especially the failures.That has been a reasonable pattern over millennia. The trouble is, time is running out if it hasn’t already. While the data on climate change is absolute, House Speaker John Boehner said “Listen, I’m not qualified to debate the science over climate change ... But I am astute enough to understand that every proposal that has come out of this administration to deal with climate change involves hurting our economy and killing American jobs. That can’t be the prescription for dealing with changes in our climate.” The 2009 statement on climate change from 18 recognized scientific organizations stated “Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver.” That was the year that Michele Bachmann said, “Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful, but there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas … It is a harmless gas.”
Corporate 'Consensus' on Offsourcing, Inversions
America’s corporate media have generally displayed a zombie-like loyalty to the doctrines of “free trade” and unfettered corporate globalization, including the offshoring of US jobs from devastated American factory towns to low-wage, high-repression nations.But when an editor at America’s most influential newspaper, the New York Times — a paper that has long championed globalization in both its news coverage and editorially — declares that a national consensus exists on the “right” of US corporations to seek out poor nations where they can freely impose misery-level wages, it perhaps signals that major-media coverage of corporate globalization is becoming downright delusional.Thus we read a Sept. 14 Times article by Jeffrey Sommer, purporting to analyze the controversy over US firms staging “inversions” to avoid US taxes. Sommer takes elite media’s fawning support of globalization to hallucinatory heights by making the flat-out claim that a broad national consensus—including most American citizens — exists on the “right” of US firms to relocate jobs:“At this stage of globalization … most American consumers, investors and politicians have tacitly accepted that if a company is profitable, doesn’t violate the law and produces appealing products and services, it can operate wherever and however it likes. …”Read More.Source: Progressive Populist/Roger BybeeCertainly, there is no disputing Sommer’s all-too obvious assertion that large-scale investors and corporate CEOs unanimously embrace the unrestrained “right” to abandon the US in relocating production to potentially more profitable low-wage nations. Further, large corporate donors have forged a solid pro-globalization mentality at the highest levels of both parties. In 2012, Republican candidate Mitt Romney avidly “offshored” jobs to repressive low-wage nations like China and defended these practices. Democratic President Barack Obama, although pounding Romney on this issue, had jettisoned his own fierce 2008 anti-“free trade” positions by ramming through three NAFTA-style trade deals in 2011. Obama even declared, “as a general proposition, companies need to have the freedom to relocate.”However, Sommer very significantly neglects the fact that Democratic members of Congress have adopted a combative stance in challenging “free-trade” agreements dating back to NAFTA in 1993 to the current proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership.Meanwhile, Sommer’s blithe claim about “consumers”— which inevitably translates into a majority of Americas” –illustrates the yawning canyon between the perspectives of the journalistic elite and the majority of Americans.