The latest fad among would-be Republican presidential contenders is to proclaim their deep commitment to fighting poverty and inequality — which sounds as plausible as a promise by McDonald's to abolish greasy food.Decades of abuse of the nation's poor and working families, which reached a crescendo in Mitt Romney's "47 percent" campaign in 2012, hasn't left much space for Republicans to follow the public morality of Pope Francis. Yet for the moment at least, they seem to think that they must.They also seem to believe that reminiscing about bread-bag overshoes, like Senator Joni Ernst, or jeering the wealth of the Clintons, like RNC chair Reince Priebus, will somehow transform them into Franciscan populists. But such delusional ploys only make them look ridiculous.So in the gracious spirit of the pontiff, who told us that even atheists can be saved, let's help our Republican brothers and sisters.Actually, there is a very easy way for people like Romney — who just announced he won't run this time — as well as his former running mate Rep. Paul Ryan, Gov. Chris Christie, Senator Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, and every kindred right-wing politician to start reforming themselves. First, they just have to stop doing almost everything they've done for the past 10 or 20 years.Just stop.Read More.Source: The Creators/Joe Conason
The Share-the-Scraps Economy
How would you like to live in an economy where robots do everything that can be predictably programmed in advance, and almost all profits go to the robots' owners?Meanwhile, human beings do the work that's unpredictable - odd jobs, on-call projects, fetching and fixing, driving and delivering, tiny tasks needed at any and all hours - and patch together barely enough to live on.Brace yourself. This is the economy we're now barreling toward.They're Uber drivers, Instacart shoppers, and Airbnb hosts. They include Taskrabbit jobbers, Upcounsel's on-demand attorneys, and Healthtap's on-line doctors.They're Mechanical Turks.The euphemism is the "share" economy. A more accurate term would be the "share-the-scraps" economy.New software technologies are allowing almost any job to be divided up into discrete tasks that can be parceled out to workers when they're needed, with pay determined by demand for that particular job at that particular moment.Customers and workers are matched online. Workers are rated on quality and reliability.The big money goes to the corporations that own the software. The scraps go to the on-demand workers.Consider Amazon's "Mechanical Turk." Amazon calls it "a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence."Read More.Source: The Huffington Post/Robert B. Reich
Scott Walker’s cunning “stumbles”? Why the dullard may actually be a political savant
A year away from any feedback from actual voters, it’s hard to resist analyzing the 2016 GOP presidential race in terms of 2012. We already know Rudy Giuliani is the Donald Trump of this cycle; “America’s mayor” has soiled himself with his hateful musings about President Obama. But the other characters are tougher to cast at this point.
It’s been tempting to see Scott Walker’s recent rise as the kind of temporary surge virtually every Republican enjoyed in the last cycle — the measure of a weak field, not a strong candidate. His stumbles in the last few weeks – on Syria, on evolution and most recently, on handling Giuliani’s Obama comments – at first confirmed that for me.But now, watching Walker raise money off the Giuliani controversy, it’s possible to think maybe there’s cunning behind his dull-eyed refusal to say whether he thinks the president is a Christian, or loves America. Walker and his team seem to believe they can create a new position in the GOP primary field: the right-wing establishment candidate. That may seem like an oxymoron, since “right wing” and “establishment” candidates have been distinct in prior cycles. But Walker thinks he has the strength to run to Jeb Bush’s right in the GOP establishment primary: to compete for donors, and the love of the party base, too.Read More.Source: Salon/Joan Walsh
Organized Labor Showing Signs of Life
On Sunday, when 3,800 members of the United Steelworkers (USW) walked off their jobs at nine oil refineries across the country (including two in my home state of California), it marked the first national oil refinery strike in more than three decades, going all the way back to 1980. Congratulations, USW. With this strike, organized labor is finally showing signs of life.Although industry analysts have pointed out that gasoline prices were already edging upwards several days before the strike, everyone is going to blame the union for any rise in gas pump prices. And why wouldn't they? Unions make excellent scapegoats. Indeed, with the strike only a couple of days old, expect the oil companies to seize this opportunity to raise prices disproportionately.But the facts tell a different story. Looking back to 1980, the year of the last national refinery strike, Phil Flynn, an analyst with the Price Futures Group, noted that even though that strike lasted a whopping three months, it had little effect on gasoline prices. According to Flynn, it raised prices only "a couple of pennies at best."Read More.Source: The Huffington Post/David Macaray
The Super-Rich Can’t Hide From the Rest of Us
My friend Craig Zobel just premiered his new movie at the Sundance Film Festival. Z for Zachariah is based on a young adult novel from the seventies about a post-apocalyptic world and a woman who lives on a farm in a remote valley. A geographic anomaly, the valley has been isolated and protected from the nuclear radiation that devastated the rest of humanity. But then a man arrives and, a while later, another. You’ll have to see it.Craig’s movie is the latest in a long line of such stories about faraway, idyllic places trying to fend off human wrongdoing – from Aristophanes’ Cloud Cuckoo Land and the pre-serpent-and-apple Garden of Eden to the Shangri-La of James Hilton’s novel, Lost Horizon. In the classic, 1937 movie version, Shangri-La’s High Lama says to the hero, a British diplomat, “Look at the world today. Is there anything more pitiful? What madness there is! What blindness! What unintelligent leadership! A scurrying mass of bewildered humanity, crashing headlong against each other, propelled by an orgy of greed and brutality.” Sounds like a typical night at Fox News.Read More.Source: BillMoyers.Com/Michael Winship
Health insurers watch profits soar as they dump small business customers
Several million previously uninsured Americans now have coverage because of Obamacare, but it could be argued that the people who have benefited most from the law—at least financially—are the top executives and shareholders of the country’s health insurance companies.Among those who apparently have not yet benefited much at all, at least so far, are owners of small businesses who would like to keep offering coverage to their employees but can no longer afford it. They can’t afford it because insurers keep jacking their rates up so high every year that more and more of them are dropping employee health benefits altogether.And let’s be clear, these insurers aren’t suffering. UnitedHealth Group, the largest health insurer, reported last week that it made $10.3 billion in profits in 2014 on revenues of $130.5 billion. Both profits and revenues grew seven percent from 2013.Read More.Source: PublicIntegrity.Org/Wendell Potter
America’s recipe for disaster: How new corporate “amnesty” plan could doom the economy
For over a decade, corporations have hoarded profits overseas, basically blackmailing the country into letting them return the money to the United States at a lower tax rate. Now, with the presentation of President Obama’s budget, virtually everyone in Washington agrees this should happen, to “pay” for public works projects; the only real difference is in the details.This leads to a strange double standard. When undocumented immigrants get a path to citizenship it’s called “amnesty”; when corporations get to keep profits at a drastically reduced tax rate, a literal amnesty from the law, it’s called a sound jobs policy. But the emerging deal could actually reduce investment and jobs, by indicating to corporations that they can dodge taxes and win a special exemption years later.The first “repatriation tax holiday” occurred in 2004. The United States, unique among developed nations in taxing foreign corporate profits, only collects the tax when those funds are repatriated into the country. In 2004, Congress allowed corporations to bring that money home at a 5.25 percent rate, well below the 35 percent standard.Read More.Source: Salon/David Dayen
Four Bogus Attacks On The Obama Budget, Debunked
A favorite maxim of Vice-President Joe Biden’s is: “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”President Obama proposed a budget that is a reflection of his values today. This puts considerable pressure on Republicans.They will pass their own budget resolution, which does not have the force of law, does not require Obama’s signature and will not involve any compromises with Democrats. (It’s only practical value is in creating guidelines for the Appropriations subcommittees to draft the various spending bills that do have the force of law.)The congressional budget will be the pure Republican id, and it will have to deal with being compared to Obama’s vision.Are congressional Republicans ready to have an honest debate between to competing visions for America? Nope. Just bogus attacks that try to kick up enough sand so we can’t have an honest debate.Below are the big four attacks you can expect to hear more of, and why they’re bogus.Bogus Attack #1: No Practical IdeasSenate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s spokesman tried to dismiss every proposal with a wave of the hand: “The president said in his State of the Union that the proposals in his budget would be filled with ideas that are ‘practical, not partisan.’ Turns out that’s not the case.”Read More.Source: Ourfuture/Bill Scher
Big Tax Bills for the Poor, Tiny Ones for the Rich
American politics are dominated by those with money. As such, America’s tax debate is dominated by voices that insist the rich are unduly persecuted by high taxes and that low-income folks are living the high life. Indeed, a new survey by the Pew Research Center recently found that the most financially secure Americans believe “poor people today have it easy.”The rich are certainly entitled to their own opinions—but, as the old saying goes, nobody is entitled to his or her own facts. With that in mind, here’s a set of tax facts that’s worth considering: Middle- and low-income Americans are facing far higher state and local tax rates than the wealthy. In all, a comprehensive analysis by the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy finds that the poorest 20 percent of households pay on average more than twice the effective state and local tax rate (10.9 percent) as the richest 1 percent of taxpayers (5.4 percent).Read More.Source: Truthdig/David Sirota
Harvard Embattled as Students, Faculty, & Alumni Join Forces for Divestment
'Unless and until institutions like Harvard act to stigmatize the root causes of global warming, we will remain addicted to a system of energy production and economic injustice that guarantees catastrophe.'
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The suit charges that the Harvard Corporation is breaching its duties under its charter by investing in fossil fuel companies.(Photo: Harvard Climate Justice Coalition/Facebook/Overlay)
The administration of one of the world's most elite higher education institutions has called the intensified tactics of its students a form of "coercive" protest and lawyers representing Harvard University will be in a court room on Friday as they try to persuade a judge to throw out a lawsuit which is part of the same effort: a push to get the Ivy League school to divest its $36 billion endowment from the fossil fuel industry.The lawsuit, filed on by seven graduate and undergraduate students last fall, argues Harvard's continued holdings in the oil, gas, coal, and related sectors is a "mismanagement of charitable funds" controlled by the board of trustees in the form of the endowment and a direct violation of its obligations to the future of the university's financial health as well as the planet's well-being.Read More.Source: Common Dreams/Jon Queally
Will E.U. Leaders Wreck Europe’s Economy to Teach Greece a Lesson?
Greece and the European Union are now in a final showdown. And if you had to place odds, the likelihood is that the stubbornness and folly of Europe’s senior leaders will create a catastrophe for both Greece and the E.U.On Monday, at a key meeting of finance ministers in Brussels, the Greek negotiators walked away from a demand that Greece recommit to the terms of the current austerity program as the precondition for extending talks on possible easing of the terms. In return, E.U. leaders had held out the possibility of token modifications—ones that would be insufficient to change the crushing terms of the current deal that has devastated the Greek economy.The Greeks quickly learned that the two hardest of the hard-liners, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble and Holland’s Jeroen Disselbloem, had vetoed a more conciliatory negotiating document reportedly prepared by their French counterpart, Pierre Moscovici, and substituted an even more unrelenting one. At that, the Greeks walked out.Read More.Source: The American Prospect/Robert Kuttner
Advancing a Multimodal Transportation System by Eliminating Funding Restrictions
One of the most pervasive, durable, and detrimental myths in transportation policy is that highways pay for themselves, while public transportation does not. In reality, both modes require significant public subsidies, as user fees—such as fuel taxes and farebox revenues—cover only a portion of total costs. States and the federal government supplement these user fees with property taxes, bonding, and general revenues. On average, these nonuser fee revenues represent 26 percent of total annual highway expenditures.Moreover, treating all highways equally obscures the fact that per-mile construction and maintenance costs, driving levels, and motor fuel tax revenues vary substantially depending on the location, size, and population around a particular road. While the overwhelming majority of driving occurs within metropolitan areas, many large urban highways and arterial roads cost substantially more money to maintain than they generate in fuel taxes. This is also true of many rural and exurban arterial roads. This means that states must cross subsidize thousands of miles of roads that generate insufficient gas tax revenues each year.Read More.Source: Center for American Progress/Kevin DeGood & Andrew Schwartz
Here's How Countries All Over the World Are Making Polluters Pay
Solving climate change is essentially an economic problem: How do you force companies and consumers to pay for the damage caused by the fossil fuels they consume?Let me explain: Without a price on carbon emissions, big polluters don't pay for the greenhouse gases that they release into the atmosphere. The real cost of that pollution is borne by the planet in the form of global warming. So one of the most common strategies for reducing emissions is "cap-and-trade": Polluters purchase or bid on a limited number of permits, which allow them to emit a certain amount of CO2. A regulated market is then created in which permits can be bought and sold. The cost of the permits—in other words, the carbon price—creates an incentive to reduce carbon pollution.Read More.Source: Mother Jones/James West
Weimar on the Aegean
Try to talk about the policies we need in a depressed world economy, and someone is sure to counter with the specter of Weimar Germany, supposedly an object lesson in the dangers of budget deficits and monetary expansion. But the history of Germany after World War I is almost always cited in a curiously selective way. We hear endlessly about the hyperinflation of 1923, when people carted around wheelbarrows full of cash, but we never hear about the much more relevant deflation of the early 1930s, as the government of Chancellor Brüning — having learned the wrong lessons — tried to defend Germany’s peg to gold with tight money and harsh austerity.
And what about what happened before the hyperinflation, when the victorious Allies tried to force Germany to pay huge reparations? That’s also a tale with a lot of modern relevance, because it has a direct bearing on the crisis now brewing over Greece.
Why Is No One Talking About The GOP's Plan To Send Millions Of Disabled Americans Into Poverty?
Despite their virtues, many conservative Republicans have an unfortunate habit of picking on the weak and disadvantaged, slandering the people least able to fight back. We saw a glimpse of this callousness in Mitt Romney’s disparagement of the “47 percent” who are “takers” living off the hard-working “makers.” The newly empowered GOP majority in Congress is going down the same road—targeting the millions of sick or injured Americans who receive Social Security disability payments.This is a favorite old canard of self-righteous right-wingers. They label these unfortunate people as shiftless and suggest none too subtly that many are faking their injuries and illnesses. The GOP has been pushing this cold-hearted slander for at least thirty-five years, ever since the glorious reign of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s (who remembers Reagan’s imaginary “Welfare Queen” who drove to pick up her welfare check in a Cadillac?).McConnell-Boehner Republicans are now reviving the Gipper’s big lie, claiming the Social Security system is in crisis because of swollen disability benefits.Read More.Source: The Nation/William Greider
Scott Walker Is King of Kochworld
On a sunny Saturday in September 2009, with Wisconsin in the throes of Tea Party fervor, conservative starlet Michelle Malkin fired up a crowd of thousands at a lakefront park in Milwaukee with rhetoric about White House czars and union thugs and the “culture of dependency that they have rammed down our throats.”Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, a Republican candidate for governor, casually attired in a red University of Wisconsin Badgers sweatshirt, stepped to the podium to amplify the message. “We're going to take back our government,” he shouted, jabbing the air with a finger. The attendees whooped and clapped. “We've done it here, we can do it in Wisconsin and, by God, we're going to do it all across America.”In a way, the event was Scott Walker's graduation to the political major leagues. The audience had been delivered up by Americans for Prosperity, a Tea Party organizing group founded by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire energy executives whose fortune helps shape Republican politics. With Americans for Prosperity, the brothers had harnessed the Tea Party's energy in service of their own policy goals, including deregulation and lower taxes. And in Walker, they’d found the perfect instrument to help carry them out. The rally was one of the first times they’d joined forces.Read More.Source: Bloomberg Politics/Julie Bykowitz
Vaccine Myths Still Persist
There’s a measles outbreak. It didn’t have to be. Measles could have been prevented, at least mostly, by routine vaccination, but in 1998 Dr. Andrew Wakefield published a report claiming that the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine was apparently the cause of autism. This report caused parents to be concerned. and a growing number to reject vaccination. The reply, which is 360 pages long and has the catchy title “Adverse Effects of Pertussis and Rubella Vaccines: A Report of the Committee to Review the Adverse Consequences of Pertussis and Rubella Vaccines,” was issued by the Institute of Medicine (US) Committee to Review the Adverse Consequences of Pertussis and Rubella Vaccines. The paperback edition costs $96.75, but it’s available for free as a download. Result: “... the committee found:• no evidence bearing on a causal relation between DPT vaccine and autism;• insufficient evidence to indicate a causal relation between DPT vaccine and aseptic meningitis, chronic neurologic damage, erythema multiforme or other rash, Guillain-Barrè syndrome, hemolytic anemia, juvenile diabetes, learning disabilities and attention deficit disorder, peripheral mononeuropathy, or thrombocytopenia, and between the currently used rubella vaccine (RA 27/3) and radiculoneuritis and other neuropathies or thrombocytopenic purpura ...”Read More.Source: The Progressive Populist/SAM URETSKY
Republicans Try To Bully US Into Attacking Iran
So far, the Republican-controlled 114th Congress has attacked women’s reproductive rights and savaged undocumented immigrants. Now they want to bully the Administration into attacking Iran.A classic Psychology Today article summarized the voluminous research on bullies. Usually they are hotheads who believe that aggression is the best way to resolve conflicts. Often they perceive provocation where it does not actually exist. They start fights. They have a strong need to dominate and typically pick on those perceived as weaker.Longitudinal studies indicate that while bullies may start out with normal intelligence levels, their aggressive behavior ultimately impairs their intellectual functions.One psychologist observed that bullies “are experts at using short-term payoffs. They’re not very good at long-range things that are in their best interest.”The Republican congressional behavior is classic bullying: “repeated, aggressive behavior intended to gain power over another.” Research suggests that bullies typically have low self-esteem. Republicans act the way they do because they’re deeply insecure; they doubt their masculinity. This explains why the GOP-dominated Congress, mostly white men, bully women, racial and ethnic minorities, and most anyone who doesn’t agree with them. It also explains their adoration of “manly” leaders such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Vladimir Putin, and Bibi Netanyahu.Now Speaker of the House, John Boehner, has scheduled bellicose Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to speak before a joint session of Congress on March 3. Netanyahu will provide his opinion of US negotiations with Iran – why they won’t work. It’s an attempt to bully the Obama Administration into attacking Iran.Read More.Source: The Progressive Populist/BOB BURNETT
RESISTANCE TO MEDICAID EXPANSION CLAIMS BATON ROUGE ER
Baton Rouge, La., is about to lose a crucial hospital emergency room because the administration of Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) has refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and won’t put up funds to keep the facility open, Michael Hiltzik noted at the Los Angeles Times (2/6).The scheduled closure of the emergency room of Baton Rouge General Medical Center-Mid City means patients needing emergency treatment will have to travel as much as 30 minutes longer to reach the nearest ERs.The ACA was designed to encourage states to expand Medicaid — almost entirely at federal expense — as a means of cutting the uncompensated medical care hospitals had been forced to provide for low-income individuals and families. Much of that care has been customarily delivered through the ER.In the expectation that Medicaid would pick up the slack, the ACA reduced so-called disproportionate share hospital payments, which went to hospitals serving a large number of the uninsured. So institutions in states that have refused to expand Medicaid, like Louisiana, have faced a double-whammy — they still have to serve a large number of uninsured patients, but they have less money to do so.The ACA has reduced uncompensated care costs across the board — by $5.7 bln in fiscal 2014 compared with what they would have been otherwise, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. But most of that effect is seen in Medicaid expansion states. The crisis has continued for hospitals in non-Medicaid expanding states. The problem is so acute that the Tennessee Hospital Assn. offered to pick up the state’s cost of expansion. That wasn’t enough: Conservative Republicans who dominate the state legislature on (2/4) voted in a Senate committee to kill a compromise plan by Republican Gov. Bill Haslam (R) to expand Medicaid to cover more than 250,000 low-income uninsured adults.Read More.Source: The Progressive Populist/DISPATCHES
Derail Trans-Pacific Pact
Democratic members of Congress need to stiffen their spines and, when it comes to vote on fast-tracking consideration of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, they must say no to President Obama. Principled conservative Republicans also ought to reject the threats to national sovereignty that the trade pact represents.The TPP has been negotiated behind closed doors for more than six years, but Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has said he wants to reintroduce a bill granting Fast Track Authority in February to grease the skids for the trade deal.Fast Track Trade Authority was created in 1974 by President Richard Nixon to minimize public debate and congressional oversight on trade deals. It has been used 16 times since then, often to enact controversial trade pacts, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and establishment of the World Trade Organization. Those deals made it easier to move manufacturing jobs out of the United States and they also lowered trade barriers to let foreign manufacturers export their goods into the United States, Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch noted.Read More.Source: The Progressive Populist/Editorial