WASHINGTON -- Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has been dreaming about cutting major deals as Senate majority leader for most of his career. Next year, he'll finally get the chance to do it with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the most ambitious free trade agreement since the Clinton era. The only thing standing in his way is his own political party.President Barack Obama's administration has been negotiating the TPP since the beginning of his presidency. Twelve nations are now involved in the talks, which have major implications for the U.S. economy, public health and foreign policy. But Obama has faced two domestic obstacles to enacting his pact: Democrats in Congress, who worry it will exacerbate income inequality, and a bloc of House Republicans, who are up in arms about the deal's implications for executive power and national sovereignty.The administration conducts the talks in secret, so the public only knows about terms of the deal through leaked documents. But opposition from conservative hardliners has intensified since GOP gains in the midterm elections, even as McConnell has pledged to cut a deal with Obama on TPP as one of his first orders of business next year.Read More.Source: The Huffington Post/Zach Carter & Sabrina Siddiqui
Fueling Corporate Welfare
Getting something for nothing is a pretty sweet deal — at least if you’re the one getting something. Not so much if you’re the one receiving nothing in exchange.Oil and gas companies are extracting gas from federal lands and paying nothing for much of it, according to a new Taxpayers for Common Sense report.One of our most troubling findings was that gas companies drilling on federal lands have avoided paying over $380 million in royalties on the fuel they’ve extracted over the past eight years.That’s a lot of money — and it could be a lot more, because it’s based on self-reported data provided by the oil and gas industries.And it’s a lot of gas.Read More.Source: Otherwords/Ryan Alexander
The Paid Vacation Route to Full Employment
This is a simple story, but politically it is a non-starter. Few Democrats are prepared to push for anything more than nickels and dimes in terms of increased spending, nothing close to magnitudes that would be needed. As far as the Republicans in Congress, it would be easier to convert the Islamic State folks to Christianity. (We could also boost demand by lowering the dollar and thereby reducing the trade deficit, but economists don't talk about that one.)The other side of the professional divide in economics doesn't have much to offer on full employment because they say we are already there. The argument goes that people have dropped out of the labor force because they would rather not work at the wage their skills command in the market. In this story, we may want to find ways to educate or train people so they have more skills, but unemployment is not really a problem in today's economy.Read More.Source: The Huffington Post/Dean Baker
A Big Election With Little Local Journalism
On a warm October night toward the end of the 2014 campaign, almost every politician running for a major office here in the swing state of Colorado
appeared at a candidate forum in southeast Denver. The topics discussed were pressing: a potential war with ISIS, voting rights, a still-struggling economy. But one key element was in conspicuously short supply: the media.This was increasingly the reality in much of the country, as campaigns played out in communities where the local press corps has been thinned by layoffs and newspaper closures. What if you held an election and nobody showed up to cover it? Americans have now discovered the answer: You get an election with lots of paid ads, but with little journalism, context or objective facts.Read More.Source: Creators.Com/David Sirota
The Fracking Rush Hits a Pothole
Ever heard of Bryan Sheffield? The baby-faced tycoon enjoyed a brief blast of fame a few months ago when he became one of those rare non-tech billionaires under 40.What ignited his rise to the ranks of Americans with money to burn? He owns a company called Parsley Energy Inc. that extracts oil and natural gas using the highly polluting technique known as fracking. Sheffield’s fortune hit the billion-dollar milestone when Parsley went public in May.But a sudden plunge in oil prices quickly spiked the young Texan’s newfound status, trimming Sheffield’s fortune to a more modest $750 million.You see, domestic oil production could hit 9.4 million barrels a day next year. This 42-year high, sparked by a fracking bonanza, is feeding a global glut that’s pushing oil prices down to levels not seen since 2010.Read More.Source: Otherwords/Emily Schwartz Greco
Obamacare and the Middle Class
Few truly appreciate the enormous economic benefits the Affordable Care Act will deliver to the American people over time, the middle class included. But you'd expect New York's seasoned Democratic senator, Charles Schumer, to "get it" rather than belittle the 2010 federal health care law as a political inconvenience for his party.Amazingly, Schumer recently complained that reforms affected only "a small percentage of the electorate." Has he any idea what's going on -- I mean beyond the calculations of the most recent election, the planning for the next?Read More.Source: Real Clear Politics/Froma Harrop
House of Misrepresentatives
The current House of Representatives may be one of the most environmentally unfriendly legislatures in U.S. history, but at least its lawmakers know how to make a bill sound good. As a farewell gesture to the 113th House, we’ve rounded up some of its most egregious measures and translated them to reveal what they’d actually mean for public lands and wildlife in the West. For the record, all of these are currently stalled in the Senate.Read More.Source: High Country News/Krista Langlois
12 Steps Forward for America
The American people must make a fundamental decision. Do we continue the 40-year decline of our middle class and the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else, or do we fight for a progressive economic agenda that creates jobs, raises wages, protects the environment and provides health care for all? Are we prepared to take on the enormous economic and political power of the billionaire class, or do we continue to slide into economic and political oligarchy? These are the most important questions of our time, and how we answer them will determine the future of our country.The long-term deterioration of the middle class, accelerated by the Wall Street crash of 2008, has not been pretty. Today, we have more wealth and income inequality than any major country on earth. We have one of the highest childhood poverty rates and we are the only country in the industrialized world which does not guarantee health care for all. We once led the world in terms of the percentage of our people who graduated college, but we are now in 12th place. Our infrastructure, once the envy of the world, is collapsing.Real unemployment today is not 5.8%, it is 11.5% if we include those who have given up looking for work or who are working part time when they want to work full time. Youth unemployment is 18.6% and African-American youth unemployment is 32.6%.Today, millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the median male worker earned $783 less last year than he made 41 years ago. The median woman worker made $1,337 less last year than she earned in 2007. Since 1999, the median middle-class family has seen its income go down by almost $5,000 after adjusting for inflation, now earning less than it did 25 years ago.The American people must demand that Congress and the White House start protecting the interests of working families, not just wealthy campaign contributors. We need federal legislation to put the unemployed back to work, to raise wages and make certain that all Americans have the health care and education they need for healthy and productive lives.Read More.Source: The Progressive Populist/Sen. Bernie Sanders
Hydrogen Cars, Coming Down the Pike
The once-distant promise of clean, affordable hydrogen-powered cars is starting to become a reality.
Several major automakers, including Toyota, Honda and Hyundai, have started or will soon start selling these cars, which will be more expensive than comparable gasoline models but a lot cheaper than they were just a few years ago.
Executives at Toyota say that the cost of making the critical components of hydrogen vehicles has fallen 95 percent since 2008. That is why the company plans to market its first mass-produced hydrogen car, the Mirai, in the United States next year. Other companies, like General Motors, Ford and Audi, are working on similar cars.
The broad adoption of hydrogen-powered cars, which emit only water and heat, could play an important role, along with electric vehicles, in lowering emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants responsible for climate change. Cars and other modes of transportation account for about 28 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, second only to power plants, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Source: New York Times Editorial Board/Nov. 29, 2014
Time to Dust Off My Reproductive Freedom Flag
The morning after the Republicans won, well, just about everything, I spent a good half-hour staring at a favorite piece of artwork that hangs in a prominent place in our home.From a distance, the piece looks like a 13-by-9-inch version of the American flag. Thirteen red and white stripes are stitched to perfection and anchored to a rectangle of dark blue fabric in the upper left corner. A nice patriotic rendering of Old Glory, matted and framed behind glass I swipe every week with my Swiffer.On closer inspection, however, one sees that Cleveland artist Dawn Hanson was up to mischief when she created this flag, which is part quilt, part craft and wholly political.Instead of 50 stars, there are four rows of tiny buttons. The first three rows — weeks one through three — are white; in the last row — week four — the buttons are pink. The days of the week run along the top: SUN, MON, TUE — you get the idea.Read More.Source: Creators/Connie Schultz
Obstruction And How The Press Helped Punch The GOP's Midterm Ticket
In the days after the midterm elections, the New York Times has been a cornucopia of campaign commentary. Lots of attention is being paid to the issue of gridlock, which has defined Washington, D.C. since President Obama was first inaugurated.Lamenting America's "broken politics," Times columnist Nicholas Kristof opted for the both-sides-are-to-blame model, suggesting that, "Critics are right that [Obama] should try harder to schmooze with legislators." Across from Kristof on the Times opinion page, Republican pollster Frank Luntz urged Obama to find a way to create "common-sense solutions" with his Republican counterparts. (This, despite the fact that Luntz in 2009 helped Republicans craft their trademark strategy of obstructing Obama at every turn.)And the same day, while reviewing Chuck Todd's new book on Obama, which stressed that the president "wanted to soar above partisanship" though his two terms will likely "be remembered as a nadir of partisan relations," the Times book critic stressed Obama's "reluctance to reach out to Congress and members of both parties to engage in the sort of forceful horse trading (like Lyndon B. Johnson's) and dogged retail politics (like Bill Clinton's) that might have helped forge more legislative deals and build public consensus."Read More.Source: Media Matters/Eric Boehlert
Beneath the Republican Wave, Voters Still Reject Right-Wing Ideology
In the wake of the 2014 midterm "wave election," Americans will soon find out whether they actually want what they have wrought. The polls tell us that too many voters are weary of President Barack Obama, including a significant number who actually voted for him two years ago. Polls likewise suggest that most voters today repose more trust in Republicans on such fundamental issues as economic growth, national security and budget discipline. But do they want what Republicans in control will do now?If they are faithful to their beliefs, the Republican leaders in Washington will now seek to advance a set of policies that are simply repugnant to the public — most notably in the Paul Ryan budget, which many Republicans have signed up to promote (though the caucus of ultra-right Republicans considers that wild plan too "moderate").House Speaker John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, who will be the Senate majority leader in January, will have to try to repeal Obamacare — but they will very likely be pushed further than that. Proposals to reduce Medicare to vouchers, privatize Social Security and gut the federal agencies that protect the health and safety of ordinary citizens and the preservation of clean water and air will soon emerge. They will continue to let the nation's infrastructure crumble. And they will attempt to shift the burden of taxation from the wealthy to the middle class, working families and even the poor.Read More.Source: Creators/Joe Conason
Voter purges alter US political map
Interstate Crosscheck is a computerized system meant to identify fraudulent voters. While Crosscheck’s list of nearly 7 million names of “potential” double voters has yet to unearth, as of this writing, a single illegal vote this year, it did help Republican elections officials scrub voters from registries, enough, it appears, to have swung several important Senate and governor’s races in favor of the GOP.There is good reason to believe that Crosscheck-related voter purges helped propel Republican candidates to slim victories in Senate races in Colorado and North Carolina, as well a tight gubernatorial race in Kansas.Interstate Crosscheck is a computer system designed to capture the names of voters who have Illegally voted twice in the same election in two different states. The program is run by Kansas’ Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Kobach’s office compares the complete voting rolls of participating states to tag “potential” double voters, those who have illegally voted twice in the same election in two states.Read More.Source: Aljazeera America/Greg Palast
The Big Climate Deal: What It Is, and What It Isn't
1) It is historic. John Kerry was right to use the phrase in his New York Times oped announcing the deal: for the first time a developing nation has agreed to eventually limit its emissions, which has become a necessity for advancing international climate negotiations.2) It isn't binding in any way. In effect President Obama is writing an IOU to be cashed by future presidents and Congresses (and Xi is doing the same for future Politburos). If they take the actions to meet the targets, then it's meaningful, but for now it's a paper promise. And since physics is uninterested in spin, all the hard work lies ahead.3) It is proof, if any more was needed, that renewable energy is ready to go. The Chinese say they'll be using clean sources to get 20 percent of their energy by 2030 -- which is not just possible, it should be easy. Which they know because they've revolutionized the production of solar energy, driving down the cost of panels by 90 percent or more in the last decade.Read More.Source: The Huffington Post/Bill McKibben
Economics for a Slow Growth World
In two recent works, The Predator State and The End of Normal, James Galbraith argues convincingly that the growth rates of the immediate post WWII period will not be restored even by robust stimulus packages or any Federal Reserve QEs. Resource costs remain high and unpredictable. In addition even if increased government spending stimulates new investment, that investment is likely to eliminate more jobs.In Galbraith’s analysis crashes are not merely the products of events outside the system, like a meteor from outer space. Instability is built into the very core of the system, primarily through the role of the large investment banks. Bank loans were crucial to the development and spread of new technologies. Nonetheless, initial success, the deregulatory climate, and the desperate quest for new targets to inflate led to loans to a clientele that should never have been served and then the bundling, hiding, and dispersal of these toxic instruments.A true Ponzi economy, but one that has left its mark, the modern investment bank now makes its money in comparable ways. It has lost the incentive and the talent to engage in the legitimate function of underwriting new business ventures and technology. It takes low-interest loans from the Fed and invests in longer-term bonds or in more speculative derivatives. Nonetheless. their continuing status as too big to fail insures them preferential access to capital markets.Read More.Source: The Progressive Populist/John BuellAmerican capitalism is very fragile, not in the sense that it is soon to be replaced by some other system but that its growth is contingent on costly and unpredictable resource base, is increasingly dominated by stock and financial market casinos, and produces a few big winners and many losers. Galbraith advocates a set of reforms that go well beyond the relatively narrow liberal agenda. These include measures to reduce the fixed costs of our resource base, including especially dramatic scaling back of the scope and high tech weaponry of the military.
The President Might Have Just Saved the Internet
During his first run for the White House, Barack Obama promised that he would take "a back seat to no one" on Net Neutrality.
Today, the president finally got in the driver's seat.Early this morning, President Obama issued a clear and powerful statement of support for real Net Neutrality -- one that left no wiggle room or confusion about where he stands.The short summary for anyone who has been following the debate over Net Neutrality: THIS IS HUGE.The president's statement is worth quoting at length:
An open Internet is essential to the American economy, and increasingly to our very way of life. By lowering the cost of launching a new idea, igniting new political movements, and bringing communities closer together, it has been one of the most significant democratizing influences the world has ever known.'Net Neutrality' has been built into the fabric of the Internet since its creation -- but it is also a principle that we cannot take for granted. We cannot allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas. That is why today I am asking the Federal Communications Commission to answer the call of almost 4 million public comments, and implement the strongest possible rules to protect Net Neutrality.Read More.Source: The Huffington Post/Craig Aaron
We Need a Conversation About Economics Before We Address Race
“We must have a conversation on race!” How many times have we heard it from the pundits, the media, politicians every time something happens elevating racial tensions in the country. The latest has been the shooting death of an black teen in Ferguson, Missouri and resulting protests.“We need a conversation on race!” No, we don’t! The United States does not have a racial problem – the US has an economic problem and race is just one collateral condition dangling off of it. Slavery wasn’t a “racial” issue but an economic one! To look at race only is looking at a tree while ignoring the forest. Attempting to remedy one failing tree in a unhealthy forest and expect the problem to go away just won’t happen.By addressing only race the “conversation” soon falls apart on issues of culture and perceptions — perceptions no one will agree on. “ Why are so many young minority men in prison? Do you think the cops just wait around to arrest them?” “White privilege” is a popular perception among African-Americans and their liberal white allies. Do “they” believe because of their color society just hands everything to white people? Granted scores of studies show employers, landlords, taxi drivers will discriminate against African-Americans much of the time. Except — comes the rejoinder — when unqualified minorities are hired under affirmative-action programs. I have heard both arguments in my own personal and professional experiences. “White privilege” and “Affirmative Action equals incompetence” and are the same interpretation from different inclinations — both non-starters.These perceptual experiences come up and “the conversation” shuts down. Since I am basically European-American I would not presume to interpret from an African-American view point but I know as soon as the term “White privilege” comes up I shut down. My reaction? “I worked damned hard for what I have accomplished and I earned what I have ... I come out of a working-class family and nobody gave me nothin’!” No doubt a similar reaction works in reverse for African-Americans on the other side of “the conversation.”Now I know the world is more complicated than that but the questions that need solving are complex. But wait, I just wrote something above holding the kernel of truth and solution to our so-called race problem – I wrote, “I come out of a working-class family.” Work! A job! Something half of minorities in this country do not have and may — through no fault of their own — never have. And therein is the core of the race problem.Read More.Source: Populist/Bill Johnston
Rand Paul’s big “selling point” is dead: How Clinton schooled him on criminal justice reform
I got a lot of pushback, mainly from Rand Paul fanboys, to my suggestion that the Kentucky senator’s blaming Eric Garner’s death on cigarette taxes was tin-eared, to say the least. The complaints, on Twitter and (surprisingly) in a lot of personal email, took two forms: 1) I’m a nanny state liberal who doesn’t care about the wanton abuse of state power to not only impose taxes but then aggressively police their enforcement. And 2) I’m terrified that Rand Paul can beat Hillary Clinton, especially because he’s better than she is when it comes to issues of our expanding police state.
On the first point: I support high cigarette taxes, because cigarettes kill people and impose vast costs on society. I regret that those taxes fall heavily on the poor, and I support community programs to help people stop smoking and improve their health. But on the issue of enforcement, cigarette taxes are just one of many, many “laws” that are over-enforced or arbitrarily enforced in poor communities, in order to give the police greater control over the population.Read More.Source: Salon/Joan Walsh
Grossest midterms winner not GOP! Why K Street is readying an “orgy of lobbying”
The saddest people in Washington during the past two years of unrelenting legislative gridlock ply their trade on K Street. When there’s no hope of passing laws, there’s no reason to hire expensive lobbyists to push for them. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, lobbyist spending fell 12.5 percent in 2013, and is on target to decrease even more this year.
Some have speculated that lobbying has just gone underground into less-regulated spheres, funneled through nonprofits and “astroturf” organizations. But if that were the case, K Street firms, mired in a three-year slump, wouldn’t be so enthralled by the imminent transfer of Senate power to the GOP. “We’re very excited,” said one Republican lobbyist. “There’s going to be more activity … Corporations and trade associations affected by Washington power will be looking to invest in those policy decisions.”Lobby shops understand that pretty much all the major legislation emerging from any partnership between President Obama and the GOP will address the concerns of big business. Look at any to-do list and you’ll notice the pattern: trade deals, tax reform, construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, government appropriations (in particular, increasing funding for defense), etc. It’s party time on K Street again.Read More.Source: Salon/David Dayen
Can Ashton Carter rein in a Pentagon out of control?
Chuck Hagel may not have been able to work with the ever more powerful National Security Council staff, but this discussion of personalities misses the point. The key to success for a defense secretary today is the ability to manage not White House aides but rather the Pentagon, which is the world’s most complicated and most dysfunctional bureaucracy. Ashton Carter, the president’s presumed choice as the next secretary, is a brilliant man and perhaps has made some friends at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. But by far the best quality he has going for him is that he seems to understand the need to rein in a Pentagon now so out of control that it is difficult to fully comprehend or explain.
Republicans worry a great deal about dysfunction in government. They launch investigations to find out why a few hundred million dollars were wasted and insist that departments do more with less. Except for the largest government bureaucracy in the world, the Defense Department, which spends about $600 billion a year — more than the entire GDP of Poland — and employs 1.4 million men and women in uniform, 700,000 civilians and 700,000 full-time contractors. The Pentagon’s accounts are so vast and byzantine that it is probably impossible to do a thorough audit of them.
Read More.Source: The Washington Post Opinion Writer Fareed Fakaria