As Santorum and Romney Battle for Loony Right, The Rest of Us Shouldn't Gloat - Robert Reich

My father was a Republican for the first 78 years of his life. For the last twenty, he’s been a Democrat.  What happened? “They lost me,” he says.

They’re losing even more Americans now, as the four remaining GOP candidates seek to out-do one another in their race for the votes of the loony right that’s taken over the Grand Old Party.  But the rest of us have reason to worry.

A party of birthers, creationists, theocrats, climate-change deniers, nativists, gay-bashers, media paranoids, anti-intellectuals, and out-of-touch country clubbers cannot govern America.  Yet even if they lose the presidency on Election Day they’re still likely to be in charge of at least one house of Congress as well as several state legislators and governorships. That’s a problem for the nation.

The GOP’s drift toward loopyness started in 1993 when Bill Clinton became the first Democrat in the White House in a dozen years.  They were not pleased to have a Democrat back in the White House in 2008, let alone a black one. They rose up in the 2010 election cycle as “tea partiers” and have by now pushed the GOP further right than it has been in more than eighty years.

The full article is available here

Wall Street Oil Speculation Driving Surge in Gas Prices - CommonDreams.org

Despite rising prices at US gas pumps, demand in the US was so low it has become a net exporter of gasoline, unable to consume all that it generates. This fact contradicts the familiar refrain from GOP politicians and operatives who claim that a 'Drill Everywhere' agenda would solve US energy woes or lead to lower prices for consumers.

That speculators have a huge impact on oil and gasoline prices is not news to anyone paying attention to the subject over the years, but it is an aspect that most media outlets rarely mention -- even when spiking gasoline prices dominate the news cycle. And legislatively, efforts to bring damaging speculative practices under control have continually stalled in Congress.

The full article is available here

What Bible is Santorum Reading? -- Mike Lux

When you claim to fervently believe in the holy words of the Judeo-Christian Bible, and your political philosophy is diametrically opposed to most of what is actually in that Bible, I have to call you out on that.

Rick Santorum's recently commented that President Obama's agenda is "Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology." I am now beginning to wonder if Santorum and other conservatives are just reading a different Bible entirely than the one I read.

While you can -- if you really work hard to do it -- find verses here and there supporting a more conservative political point of view on certain specific issues, there is simply no way to read the Bible I read and not come to the conclusion that it is overwhelmingly supportive of helping the poor, showing mercy to the weak, refraining from judging, treating others as you would treat yourself, calling on the wealthy to give their money to the poor.

Jesus talks about mercy to those in trouble in 24 verses of the Gospels, tells people not to judge in 34 verses, tells people to love and forgive even their enemies in 53 verses, tells people to love their neighbors as themselves and treat others as they would want to be treated in 19 verses, and specifically tells people to help the poor and/or spurn riches and the wealthy in 128 verses.

If you want to believe in a God who doesn't care about the poor, loves the wealthy more than anyone else, and wants you to be selfish, feel free. But when you claim to fervently believe in the holy words of the Judeo-Christian Bible, and your political philosophy is diametrically opposed to most of what is actually in that Bible, I have to call you out on that. When Rick Santorum says that Obama follows a theology not based on the Bible, I have to say this: either he is not reading the same Bible I do, or he is not reading the Bible at all, because Rick Santorum's political views are in direct, fundamental opposition to the Bible he claims to follow.

Modern conservatives argue that everyone should take what they want and devil take the hindmost, that we are all on our own, and that if you are rich it means that a Darwinian selection process allowed you to succeed, and that you owe nothing to anyone else. Modern conservatives are far more faithful to Ayn Rand, who openly rejected Christianity because of its values of helping the poor and caring for others. Give her credit for one thing: at least she was honest.

The full article is available here

2 Years After Haiti's Quake, Women Still Shattered by Sexual Exploitation -- Michelle Chen

It’s been two years since hell paid Haiti a visit, but for countless women, terror still stalks the ruins. The scars of the January 2010 earthquake are etched on their bodies, in an ever-widening pattern of sexual exploitation. 

A crisis of gender-based violence and exploitation is festering--and foreign aid efforts are still failing to protect survivor communities from harm, or to make the criminal justice system more accountable.

“Survival sex” (referring to the trading of sex for basic resources) has become a common way to get by in an economy that traffics in desperation. Last November and December a research team found that many women and girls had “exchanged sex for food, education or other necessities for themselves and their families.”

Unable to secure decent work or housing, women and girls often turn to selling sex for precious resources like “coupons for aid distributions, access to direct aid distributions, cash for work programs, money, or even a single meal,” according to the study. Though many women surveyed said they used survival sex to meet individual needs, some women bartered sex to support their children or pay for schooling.

The full article is available here

Larry Summers & Bill Clinton: Democrats Who, Acting Like Republicans, Unleashed Wall St. - Robert Scheer

That Lawrence Summers, a president emeritus of Harvard, is a consummate distorter of fact and logic is not a revelation. That he and Bill Clinton, the president he served as treasury secretary, can still get away with disclaiming responsibility for our financial meltdown is an insult to reason. 

Summers, like Clinton, still defends the reversal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, a 1999 repeal that destroyed the wall between investment and commercial banking put into place by Franklin Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression.  He tries to obscure the obvious truth—that the too-big-to-fail banks, made legal by Clinton-era deregulation, required taxpayer bailouts.  Citigroup—where Robert Rubin, who preceded Summers as Clinton’s treasury secretary, played leading roles during a critical time—specialized in precisely the mortgage and other debt packages and insurance scams that were the source of America’s economic crisis.

In the current edition of Esquire magazine, Clinton, in a rare moment of honest appraisal of his record, conceded that his signing of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), legalizing those credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, was based on bad advice. That advice would have had to come from Summers, his point man pushing the CFMA legislation, which Clinton signed into law during his lame-duck days.

That new law exempted derivatives trading from all existing regulations and regulatory agencies. Summers argued in his congressional testimony that there was no reason for any government regulation of what turned out to be tens of trillions of dollars in toxic assets.

The full article is available here

Adding to the deficit: Bush vs. Obama - Ezra Klein

Since President Obama became chief executive, the national debt has risen almost $5 trillion. But how much of that was because of policies passed by Obama, and how much was caused by the financial crisis, the continuation of past policies and other effects? For this analysis, we worked with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to attach a price tag to the legislation passed by Obama and his predecessor.

George W. Bush’s major policies increased the debt by more than $5 trillion during his presidency. Obama has increased the debt by less than $1 trillion.

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Apple Makes Good Products, Flawed Arguments -- Reagen-era Trade Negotiator Clyde Prestowitz

Several points in the recent New York Times story on Apple and why the iPhone jobs are mostly not in America caught my attention, but none more so than the statement by a top Apple executive that " We [Apple] don't have an obligation to solve America's problems."

In the 1981-86 period I was one of the U.S. government's top trade negotiators, especially with Japan. At that time, Apple was trying to crack the Japanese market for personal computers and getting nowhere. Steve Jobs and other Apple executives had the funny notion that the U.S. government had an obligation to help them and asked me and other negotiators at the Commerce Department and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to help them get on the shelf in Japan.

Apple's products still have a large U.S. government R&D content and I'll bet that the guy who says Apple has no obligation to help Uncle Sam does strongly believe that Uncle Sam has an obligation to stop foreign pirating of Apple's intellectual property and to maintain the deployments of the U.S. Seventh Fleet and of the 100,000 U.S. troops in the Asia-Pacific region that make it safe for Apple to use supply chains that stretch through a number of countries such as China and Japan between which there are long standing and bitter animosities.

And those supply chains. Are they the natural product of good old free market capitalism or does that scalability and flexibility and capacity to mobilize large numbers of workers on a moment's notice have something to do with government subsidies and the interventionist industrial policies and of most Asian economies? It's the latter, of course. Apple is not the pinnacle of capitalism. It's the pinnacle of the marriage of Silicon Valley innovation with strategic Asian mercantilism.

I'm amazed at the one way thinking of many U.S. corporate types as revealed in the article.  In several places, it states that America no longer produces the kind of workers with the kind of skills necessary to run the kinds of factories and supply chains that operate now in Asia.  But the truth is more nearly the opposite. It's because the companies are moving the jobs overseas that no Americans are learning the necessary skills. This is true for two reasons. One is that Americans are generally not stupid and recognize that because of off-shoring there won't be any those kinds of jobs and thus there is no sense in learning the skills necessary to do them. The second is that most of this kind of job or skill training occurs on the job, and if there are no jobs then there will be no skills.

The full article is available here