It was startling to see physician and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) claim the other day that people on disability were faking bad backs and anxiety to get on the dole and cheat the taxpayers. These are real ailments, sometimes totally debilitating, as anyone who has suffered from either can tell you. Severe back pain can make it impossible to work at any job, even those which only require sitting. Anxiety disorder is a terrible condition that can even make some people unable to even leave their house. What kind of medical doctor would deny such a thing? (If you answered, “one who will willingly trade his professional integrity for political points” you’d be right.)But this is actually part of the GOP’s ongoing quest to degrade “entitlements” and make America’s health care system the worst in the world for anyone who isn’t wealthy. Their ongoing attack on Obamacare opened up a window to their underlying philosophy about affordable health care. (They’re not for it.) And now they are taking legislative aim at the Supplemental Security Income portion of the Social Security System. This is the program that makes it possible for people with disabilities to live without begging on the streets. Despite the fact that the Congress has always routinely pushed money back and forth between the retirement and disability portions of the program as the need occurred, the Republicans in congress have decided that they no longer support doing such a thing. The result, if they have their way, would be to cut the meager stipends of millions of disabled Americans within the next year.Read More.The Progressive Populist/HEATHER DIGBY PARTON
Driving the Obama Tax Plan: The Great Wage Slowdown
The key to understanding President Obama’s new plan to cut taxes for the middle class is the great wage slowdown of the 21st century.
Wages and incomes for most Americans have now been stagnant for 15 years. They rose at a mediocre pace for much of President Bush’s tenure in the 2000s, before falling sharply during the financial crisis that dominated the end of his presidency. Mr. Obama helped break the back of the crisis, but the recovery on his watch has been decidedly mediocre, too — especially in terms of paychecks.
Even as job growth has picked up in recent months, wages haven’t grown much more quickly than inflation. As a result, the government’s official statistics suggest that the typical American household makes no more than the typical household did in the final years of the 20th century.
That’s remarkable. There is little modern precedent for a period of income stagnation lasting as long as this one. Official records don’t exist before World War II. But the best estimate is that the Great Depression may be the only other modern time in which incomes for most households in the United States have grown so slowly — or not at all — for so long.
Source: New York Times/David Leonhardt
Bondi asks for an Investigation of Governor Scott’s Handling of the FDLE Commissioner’s Resignation
Attorney General, Pam Bondi is joining forces with Florida Cabinet members to investigate Governor Rick Scott’s actions that led to the resignation of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner, Gerald Bailey. Bondi was silent for a while and was watched closely by the state’s law enforcement network because she is the state’s chief legal officer and that requires her to work with law enforcement officials at all levels.She broke her silence by issued the following statement:
. . . The recent process behind the appointment of a new FDLE Commissioner has raised serious questions, and those questions should be answered to ensure transparency, and the public’s right to know.
Bondi went on to say:
Since the last Cabinet meeting on January 13th, my office has been vigorously discussing how to do just that. At the next Cabinet meeting, on February 5th, we will discuss these issues, thoroughly, and in the sunshine.
Bondi’s statement came a day after Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater spoke out and called for a new search for Bailey’s replacement because Rick Swearington was handpicked by Scott for the position. Atwater had also pointed out he thought one of his deputies, Jay Etheridge should be considered for the position.Atwater said:
We need a better process. One that’s transparent.
All of this questioning was brought on only after Bailey spoke to the press. He told the Times/Herald he did not resign voluntarily and that he was bullied to resign by Scott and his administration. He also told the Times/Herald Scott’s former chief of staff, Adam Hollingsworth, ordered him to falsely identify an Orlando court clerk as being the target of a criminal investigation.The governor’s office has since denied all of Bailey’s allegations which are pretty serious. Governor Scott insisted he stepped down willingly. He said:
He did the right thing by stepping down. Rick Swearingen is going to do a good job. What I’ve done, as I’ve done in this job, and what I did in the private sector, is keep finding new people, find new energy, new idea. I’m going to continue to do that.
Source: Shark Tank/Posted By Nicole Sanders
Ousted FDLE chief raises new allegations about meddling by Gov. Rick Scott, aides
TALLAHASSEE — Ousted Florida Department of Law Enforcement commissioner Gerald Bailey claims he resisted repeated efforts by Gov. Rick Scott and his top advisers to falsely name someone a target in a criminal case, hire political allies for state jobs and intercede in an outside investigation of a prospective Scott appointee.
UPDATE: Two Tallahassee groups ask for criminal probes into Scott's handling of FDLE
(UPDATE: At 5:26 p.m., Gov. Rick Scott's office issued a response to this post: "These allegations are false," said Tim Cerio, General Counsel, in an email from spokeswoman Jackie Schutz.)Two Tallahassee non-profits, the non-partisan watchdog group Integrity Florida and the liberal advocacy group Progress Florida, are asking for criminal investigations into Gov. Rick Scott's oversight of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.On Wednesday, Integrity Florida asked the FBI to investigate allegations that Scott's office pressured the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to falsely name the Orange County Clerk of Courts as a target of a criminal investigation.Gerald Bailey, who was forced out as FDLE commissioner in December, told the Times/Herald last week that Scott's office pressured him to claim that the acting clerk of court in Orange County, Colleen Reilly, was the target of a 2013 FDLE criminal inquiry. Bailey said that when he refused, a Scott aide stormed out of his office.In an interview Tuesday, officials with the Orange County Clerk of Courts office said the FDLE never considered charging anyone in the 60-person criminal division in the investigation. The FDLE won't comment."The allegations made by former Commissioner Bailey are troubling," said Dan Krassner, executive director of Integrity Florida said in a release. "While the public should not rush to judgment, this is a serious matter that merits a federal investigation."Read More.Source: Tampa Bay Times/Michael Van Sickler
Privatization Drives in Asia: Brisk, but Brutal
In the 2012 elections in South Korea, Park Geun-hye, as a presidential candidate, pledged to rebuild the middle class and increase its size to 70% of South Korean society. It turned out to be an effective political strategy that greatly contributed to her election. In many Asian economies, economic polarization has become an important issue and it has its impact on the political debate.It is to be recalled that South Korean economy was severely affected by the Asian financial crisis in 1997. The majority of the working population and many middle-class people lost their livelihoods due to layoffs, early retirements and business failures. But,a small elite group with financial resources utilized the adverse conditions of credit-scarce market and benefitted with the connivance of ruling elites in the government. For the past two decades, the policies were framed to further the interests of the corporate financial groups and for their capital and profit accumulation. One could see this development in all Asian countries for the past two decades. Among all such neoliberal initiatives of the governments, the privatization of public services contributed to the fast growth of the financial assets of top-level corporate groups.The growing inequality in Asian societies is strongly connected with an economic initiative, the privatization at all levels of industry, agriculuture and service sectors. The announcements of the Ministers and Prime Ministers about the privatization measures are the regular new-items in the media.The public services, which were under state patronage for a longtime, have been privatized in all countries. In many countries in Asia, the governments are vigorously pursuing privatization in the service sectors like water, electricity, education, health etc. They were steadily handed over to private corporate groups, causing gloominess in the lives of working population and the poor. The people were affected by the increases in service charges, rate-hikes and were denied access to water, electriticity and other basic necessities.Over the last two decades, the water lobby companies were using water resources for their profit-pursuit while peoples’ movements have been defending ‘the human right’ of the common people to have access to water resources.Public water and sanitation management have actually disappeared from the field of state governance. The UN bodies, major bilateral agencies like EU, OECD, multilateral banks like IMF, African Development Bank are all promoting that mixed management models such as Private-Public-Partnerships. They recommend privatized management as a panacea for the water crisis.The several corporations in the field of water resources have gained a lot from the water projects undertaken by the World Bank. Two of the Bank’s most often cited “success” stories were in Manila, Philippines, and Nagpur, India. But in both cases real beneficiaries were not the people but the companies like Veolia.Read More.Source: Populist.Com/N. Gunasekaran
Why the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Is a Pending Disaster
Republicans who now run Congress say they want to cooperate with President Obama, and point to the administration's Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, as the model. The only problem is the TPP would be a disaster.If you haven't heard much about the TPP, that's part of the problem right there. It would be the largest trade deal in history -- involving countries stretching from Chile to Japan, representing 792 million people and accounting for 40 percent of the world economy -- yet it's been devised in secret.Lobbyists from America's biggest corporations and Wall Street's biggest banks have been involved but not the American public. That's a recipe for fatter profits and bigger paychecks at the top, but not a good deal for most of us, or even for most of the rest of the world.Read More.Source: Huffington Post/Robert Reich
Scalise must go, already: Seriously, why does he still have a GOP leadership job?
Last summer, RNC chair Reince Priebus told the National Committee of Black Journalists he had a dream.“If we work like dogs day in, day out — instead of getting 6% of black votes across the country … we can do a lot better,” Priebus told the group. “That’s our goal.”It turns out he actually used that odd term – “work like dogs” – more than once in pitching his plan to expand black support for the GOP. “If we work like dogs…instead of 5% in the black community, can we get to 9 percent?” he asked NBC’s Chuck Todd. On the whole issue of the GOP’s demographic problems – with young, Latino, Black, gay and single women voters — Priebus pledged last year: “We’ll work like dogs to try to figure it out.”Ironically, Republican leaders worked like dogs over the holiday season, but not to win black support. Instead they’re trying to hold on to a leadership role for Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, after it came out that he addressed former KKK grand wizard David Duke’s European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), a white nationalist organization, in 2002. House Speaker John Boehner says he wants Scalise to stay as whip, and so does Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.Read More.Source: Salon/Joan Walsh
Why Jeffrey Sterling Deserves Support as a CIA Whistleblower
The trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, set to begin in mid-January, is shaping up as a major battle in the U.S. government’s siege against whistleblowing. With its use of the Espionage Act to intimidate and prosecute people for leaks in “national security” realms, the Obama administration is determined to keep hiding important facts that the public has a vital right to know.After fleeting coverage of Sterling’s indictment four years ago, news media have done little to illuminate his case—while occasionally reporting on the refusal of New York Times reporter James Risen to testify about whether Sterling was a source for his 2006 book “State of War.”Risen’s unwavering stand for the confidentiality of sources is admirable. At the same time, Sterling—who faces 10 felony counts that include seven under the Espionage Act—is no less deserving of support.Revelations from brave whistleblowers are essential for the informed consent of the governed. With its hostilities, the Obama Justice Department is waging legalistic war on our democratic rights to know substantially more about government actions than official stories. That’s why the imminent courtroom clash in the case of United States of America v. Jeffrey Alexander Sterling is so important.Read More.Source: Common Dreams/Norman Solomon
Good news on health care in 2014, but we're still spending too much
The end of the year is always a good time to reflect on what went right and what didn’t and to speculate about what might happen in the coming 12 months.So let’s take a look at how the U.S. health care system changed in 2014—the first year of close-to-full implementation of Obamacare—and take note of what we need to address sooner rather than later as we get ready to ring in the new year.There is plenty of reason to celebrate and, as you can imagine, the White House wants us to believe that we can thank the Affordable Care Act for all the good things that happened. While I’m willing to give the law its due, the reality is that, as written, it will never get us to universal coverage or do nearly enough to control health care costs. But first, some of the good news:
- As the number of newly insured Americans reached an estimated 9.7 million this year, the percentage of Americans without coverage fell to the lowest level it’s been in years. That’s according to the National Center for Health Statistics, which released data last Thursday showing that the percentage of uninsured Americans dropped from 14.4 percent in 2013 to 11.3 percent in the second quarter of 2014. The White House Council of Economic Advisors says that’s the largest drop in at least four decades. The last time so many people gained coverage in a single year was when the Medicare and Medicaid programs began enrolling folks in 1966. The current gains were made possible by provisions of the Affordable Care Act that make it illegal for insurers to turn down applicants because of pre-existing conditions, as well as the availability of federal subsidies that help millions of Americans with their premiums and out-of-pocket spending.
Read More.Source: The Center For Public Integrity/Wendell Potter
Ensuring the Uninsured Suffer
America just celebrated the season of giving with Hanukkah and Christmas presents, year-end charity donations and soup kitchen volunteering. It is a time when Americans demonstrate the generosity, caring and kindness that define them as a people.Now, however, Americans may suffer the season of GOP taking. Republicans already insisted on taking away a key protection in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Now they’re intent on taking health insurance from millions of Americans who got it under the Affordable Care Act.The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a manifestation of Americans’ concern for each other’s welfare. Americans felt it was intolerable for so many of their friends, neighbors and relatives to be uninsured in the richest country in the world, to be bankrupted by medical bills, to die for lack of medical care. So they found a way to do something about it. That is the ACA. Among other benefits, it extends Medicaid and provides subsidies enabling the working poor to afford insurance. But the GOP is all against it. Republicans tried to repeal the law, appealed to courts to overturn it and refused its expansion of Medicaid. As they become the majority party in both houses of Congress this month, Republicans will intensify their campaign to take health insurance from millions who got it through the ACA.
Read More.Source: The Huffington Post/Leo W. Gerard
Don’t believe what you hear about the US economy
The end of the year produced a number of media celebrations for the United States’ economic comeback. News stories endlessly touted the 5.0 percent GDP growth figure for the third quarter, contrasting it with weak growth in Europe, slowing growth in China and a recession in Japan. Reporters also touted the 321,000 jobs gained in November — the strongest such growth in almost three years. In addition, the month’s 0.4 percent rise in the average hourly wage was taken as evidence that workers were now sharing in the benefits of growth.The economic news was so positive, in fact, that the Republicans switched from blaming Obama for his allegedly job-killing taxes and regulations to taking credit for the economy’s performance. Leading Republican anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist credited the budget cuts demanded by Republicans in 2011 for the economy’s strength.As usual, just about everything we’ve heard about the economy is wrong. To start, the 5.0 percent growth number must be understood against a darker backdrop: The economy actually shrank at a 2.1 percent annual rate in the first quarter. If we take the first three quarters of the year together, the average growth rate was a more modest 2.5 percent.The economy is very slowly making up the gap between potential GDP and actual GDP — that is, the value of the goods and services the economy could be producing but isn’t because of a lack of demand. The Congressional Budget Office puts the size of this gap at 3.6 percent of GDP, which comes to more than $600 billion annually, or more than $4,000 per household. This is a lot of money to be throwing in the garbage every year. At the economy’s growth rate through the first three quarters of 2014, we will close this gap in 12 to 36 years.Read More.Source: Aljazeera America/Dean Baker
GOP’s coming horror show: Why new Congress may be even worse than you think
If there is one thing on which I wish I’d laid a bet over the past few years it’s that despite their successful strategy to make the economic recovery as weak as possible, the minute it started to substantially improve, the conservatives would be standing at the head of the line taking credit for it. It was as predictable as the sun coming up tomorrow that they would claim their obstructive tactics resulted in Morning in America. After all, it just rewarded them with a Republican majority in the Senate and enlarged their majority in the House so they must be on the right track, right?
Still, the Beltway wags insist that the new class of Republicans are the grown-ups who are coming to town determined to prove they can “govern.” What they mean by governance is a little vague but is generally assumed to require bipartisan comity and the president happily throwing back some Merlot (and possibly sharing a few puffs on a Marlboro) with John Boehner at the end of a tough day. And it means passing “meaningful legislation” in which both parties are proud and happy to hold hands and do the tough business that Americans all allegedly sent them to Washington to do. The Washington Post put it this way:
The incoming Senate majority leader has set a political goal for the next two years of overseeing a functioning, reasonable majority on Capitol Hill that scores some measured conservative wins, particularly against environmental regulations, but probably not big victories such as a full repeal of the health-care law.
McConnell’s priority is to set the stage for a potential GOP presidential victory in 2016. “I don’t want the American people to think that if they add a Republican president to a Republican Congress, that’s going to be a scary outcome. I want the American people to be comfortable with the fact that the Republican House and Senate is a responsible, right-of-center, governing majority,” the Kentucky Republican said in a broad interview just before Christmas in his Capitol office.Read More.Source: Salon/Heather Digby Parton
Voodoo Time Machine
Many of us in the econ biz were wondering how the new leaders of Congress would respond to the sharp increase in American economic growth that, we now know, began last spring. After years of insisting that President Obama is responsible for a weak economy, they couldn’t say the truth — that short-run economic performance has very little to do with who holds the White House. So what would they say?
Well, I didn’t see that one coming: They’re claiming credit. Never mind the fact that all of the good data refer to a period before the midterm elections. Mitch McConnell, the new Senate majority leader, says that he did it, that growth reflected “the expectation of a new Republican Congress.”
2015: A Year of Great Opportunity for Progressives
Watching the Republicans glory in their new majority in the Senate and expanded majority in the House is hard to take for progressive Democrats. Democrats have dug ourselves a deep hole, and the country will suffer as the most conservative political party in American history controls the Congress. What very few people (especially progressive activists) understand, though, is that it is in moments like this when really important victories can be won.America’s political history is full of examples. Decisive defeat in an election doesn’t automatically spell doom to the side either in the short run or long run in terms of policy fights. The election of hard pro-slavery President James Buchanan, followed by the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, was the pinnacle of slave power, where it looked like all political power had been stripped from the abolitionist movement, yet less than a decade later, slavery was outlawed for all time. William McKinley’s decisive 1900 defeat of William Jennings Bryan looked like the end of populist hopes and dreams, yet within a few years much of the populist agenda was starting to be enacted. It was a bitter disappointment when Nixon pulled out an incredibly close win against liberal stalwart Humphrey, but in Nixon’s first term OSHA and the EPA were founded, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed, and the first affirmative action programs were put in place.And here are some questions about more recent times: when were the only two minimum wage increases between 1980 and 2007? 1990, after the devastating win by GHW Bush in 1988, and 1996, after the Republicans swept into power in the 1994 elections. When was the tax reform bill essentially written by the strongest progressive tax group (Citizens for Tax Justice) in the country passed? 1986, after the Reagan landslide in 1984. When was the landmark bill providing health insurance to children passed? 1997, when Gingrich was Speaker. When was the only progressive legislation on corporate corruption (Sarbanes-Oxley) passed since 1980? 2002, after the second Bush won the first time and with Tom DeLay the most powerful man in the House. When did the President’s top priority legislation, Social Security privatization, never even come up for a vote in spite of the Republicans having control of both Houses of Congress in the aftermath of two bad elections for the Democrats? 2005, after both Bush and several new GOP Senators won.It is time for progressives to stop thinking only defensively (although defensive battles can be great wins as well, like the Social Security fight against Bush), and start thinking about what we can win. While it is true that the Republican party keeps getting further and further to the right, making it hard to pass good legislation, let me give some examples of some of the ways we can fight and win progressive victories over the next two years:Read More.Source: The Progressive Populist/Michael Lux
How States Are Redistributing the Wealth
In 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama was lambasted for supposedly endorsing policies of wealth redistribution. The right feared that under an Obama presidency, Washington would use federal power to take money from some Americans and give it to others. Yet, only a few years later, the most explicit examples of such redistribution are happening in the states, and often at the urging of Republicans.The most illustrative example began in 2012, when Kansas’ Republican Gov. Sam Brownback signed a landmark bill that delivered big tax cuts to high-income earners and businesses. Less than two years after that tax cut, the state’s income tax revenues plummeted by a quarter-billion dollars—and now Brownback is pushing to use money for public employees’ pensions to instead cover the state’s ensuing budget shortfalls.Brownback’s proposal: Slash the state’s required pension contribution by $40 million to balance the state budget, even though Kansas already has one of the worst-funded pension systems in the nation.Read More.Source: Truthdig/David Sirota
Antonin Scalia: Torture's Not Torture Unless He Says it Is
Perhaps, as Justice Scalia told a Swiss university audience earlier this month, it is indeed “very facile” for Americans to declare that “torture is terrible.” The justice posited to his listeners a classic ticking-time-bomb scenario—this one involving “a person that you know for sure knows the location of a nuclear bomb that has been planted in Los Angeles and will kill millions of people”—and asked, “You think it’s clear that you cannot use extreme measures to get that information out of that person?” Now, I didn’t see that episode of 24, but I have read my Bill of Rights, and I’m far more inclined to align myself here with James Madison than with Jack Bauer—or with Antonin Scalia.Psychopaths, sadists, and Scalia notwithstanding, no one really asks the asinine question, “Is torture terrible?” because it’s already been answered. Torture, George Washington told his troops in 1775, brings “shame, disgrace, and ruin” to the country; earlier this month, Sen. John McCain called the CIA’s enhanced interrogation tactics “shameful and unnecessary” and decried their employment. The UN expressly banned torture in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and twice underlined the position in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (adopted in 1966) and Convention Against Torture (adopted in 1984). Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions (1949) prohibits “violence of life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture,” as well as “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” Finally, torture is illegal in the United States under federal law.Read More.Source: The Nation/Katrina Vanden Heuvel
The cult of gun-toting
That Idaho mother shot to death by her 2 year-old son in a Walmart store? Judging by Veronica Jean Rutledge's biography, you can be just about certain that she'd driven to the store wearing a seat belt, with her little boy buckled carefully into his car seat.By all accounts, Rutledge, age 29, was that kind of mother: loving, diligent and careful — an entirely admirable young woman. In the aftermath of the tragedy, photos of her shining face are almost unbearable to contemplate.A high school valedictorian, Rutledge graduated from the University of Idaho with a degree in chemistry. She was a promising research scientist at Batelle's Idaho National Laboratory, working on reducing the toxicity of nuclear waste.Read More.Source: Arkansas Times/Gene Lyons
End the Cuban Embargo for Good
What did President Barack Obama mean when he declared that Washington will normalize relations with Cuba?Will they become the same as U.S. relations with any other country? Will all Americans be free to travel there? To do business with Cuba?Or will the strict restrictions in place for more than half a century merely get tweaked? After all, our economic embargo will remain in place unless Congress acts.I knew very little about Cuba when I went there on a reporting trip in 2010.I’d wanted to go ever since I found out that most Americans are banned from going there by our own government. We’re the land of the free, right? So why can’t we go to Cuba?My contrarian desire to visit grew when I learned that Cuba had unintentionally become a haven of organic agriculture.Read More.Source: Otherwords/Jill Richardson
Behold, the Magic Kingdom of Dynamic Scoring
While most citizens were distracted by the holidays, the enlarged Republican majority in Congress was laying golden pavers for its magical kingdom — a fabulous place where taxes are cut, military spending is not and budgets
balance effortlessly. The coat of arms reads, "Tax Cuts Pay for Themselves."And to think the rubble has hardly been cleared from the ruins of the most recent magical kingdom, that ruled by George W. Bush. Not only did the Bush tax cuts not pay for themselves but tax revenue as a share of the economy today isn't even close to what it was in 2000.So how can Republican leaders restore the realm? For starters, they've launched a campaign to replace Doug Elmendorf, the economist overseeing the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO is the nonpartisan agency that estimates the cost of legislation.Let it be noted that prominent conservative economists — among them Gregory Mankiw, chairman of W.'s Council of Economic Advisers — have called for Elmendorf's reappointment. Elmendorf "is a superb economist and, over the past six years as CBO director, has shown himself to be scrupulously nonpartisan," Mankiw said.Read More.Source: The Creators/Froma Harrop