10 Ways to Avoid the Fiscal Cliff - Josh Harkinson

Although you might never know it from listening to the pundits, America isn't broke.

We have plenty of money to pay for government programs—we've just gradually lost our ability to collect it.  The money is there if you know where to look for it.

Here are 10 ways that politicians could avoid the fiscal cliff's $1.2 trillion in trigger cuts.

While these ideas alone won't immediately eliminate the budget deficit, they will, combined with expected growth, point the nation towards a sustainable fiscal path.

1. Stop giving investors a sweetheart deal
2. Quit subsidizing mansions and vacation homes
3. End the "step up" giveaway on inherited stocks
4. Revitalize the "death tax"
5. Heed America's favorite investment guru, Warren Buffet
6. Reset back to Clinton-era tax rates for upper incomes
7. Take agribusiness giants off the federal teat
8. End oil and gas sweetheart subsidies
9. Forget cap and trade: Impose a carbon tax instead
10. Stop giving corporations an excuse to hide profits and send jobs abroad

The full article is available here

The Central Park Five - AV Club

The facts of the case mattered less than what it represented: a city fighting back against the thugs, whether they were guilty of anything or not.
Ken Burns’ documentary The Central Park Five departs from his usual style, perhaps because it’s a collaboration with his daughter Sarah (who previously wrote a book about the subject of this film) and her husband David McMahon; or perhaps because it’s not a look back at America’s distantly painful past, but rather about a fresher wound; a rush to judgment in a city on edge in 1989.  New York City was dealing escalating racial tension, exacerbated by gang violence, police brutality, and vigilantism. 

The Central Park Five tells its story largely via interviews with the Five themselves, supplemented with archival news footage and atmospheric shots of the locations where these events took place. Missing from the film—because they declined to participate—are the rape victim, her actual attacker, or anyone from the police or the prosecution. And though there’s explanatory on-screen text throughout, the movie has no narrator. So unlike the comprehensive, authoritative voice of most of Burns’ documentaries, The Central Park Five is more subjective, bordering on claustrophobic.

That closed-off quality costs The Central Park Five some drama. It never expands its scope or meaning over the course of its two-hour running time. But the specifics make the story powerful regardless. Yet, the facts of the case mattered less than what it represented: a city fighting back against the thugs, whether they were guilty of anything or not.

The full article is available here

Dear Congress, This Holiday Season, Don’t Make the Poor Poorer - A Circle of Protection

A Circle Of Protection

This season is when many in our country give of their time and money to help those in need. These programs are important.

A lot of ink, pixels, and air have been used on the potential effects of the so-called “fiscal cliff.” While many experts say that “cliff” is a misnomer (it’s more of long slope in the wrong direction), there is at least broad agreement that it’s not the right direction for the country’s long-term health.

We’ve heard a lot about the potential effects on Wall Street, our nation’s credit rating, and even the military. But little has been said about the devastating consequences for our nation and the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people — or for the charities and non-profits that serve them. 

This week, the Circle of Protection, released an open letter to the president and Congress with a simple message: during the holidays, please “advance policies that protect the poor — not ones that make them poorer.”

This season is when many in our country give of their time and money to help those in need. These programs are important. But according to Bread for the World, all the food provided by churches and charities amounts to only 6 percent of what the federal government spends. And, unfortunately, a recent poll commissioned by World Vision, shows that while Americans plan to spend more this year on gifts, they are planning on giving less to charity.

The full article is available here

Precise Weapons Kill Civilians Too - Peter Hart

Calling airstrikes that kill civilians more often than fighters "precise"–well, perhaps there's a more precise word than that.

As a general rule, it'd be better if media accounts of war did not stress the surgical precision of the weapons being used. It's a fixture of U.S. reporting on U.S. wars, but the same rhetoric is used when U.S. allies, like Israel, are dropping bombs.

According to the Palestinians Centre for Human Rights (11/19/12), 87 Palestinians had been killed, 57 of them civilians in the last round of fighting. Another tally finds that 72 percent of the casualties are civilians.

It could be argued, as defenders of Israeli military attacks have done before, that this ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths is more humane than recent U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But calling airstrikes that kill civilians more often than fighters "precise"–well, perhaps there's a more precise word than that.

The full article is available here

Foreign Policy Experts React To The "Red Dawn" Remake - Asawin Suebsaeng

It's a conceptually hilarious invasion premise and completely implausible.

Hollywood has remade Red Dawn, and the foreign-policy community is baffled.  The 2012 remake updates the villains to North Korean troops—aided by Putin's Russia—who conquer large chunks of America with their warplanes, electromagnetic pulse machine, and use of anti-Wall Street propaganda. 

It's a conceptually hilarious invasion premise and completely implausible. Three foreign policy experts weigh in on the remake:

* Lawrence Korb, former assistant secretary of defense to Ronald Reagan, and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress:  "How are the North Koreans gonna get here? We're talking about thousands of miles. Did they stage an amphibious landing like we did in Normandy? Did they fly over? Each of the pilots in their air force only flies four hours each year! Their military is in terrible shape, they don't have enough fuel."

* Christopher Preble, VP for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute: "To pose the North Koreans as a credible threat to the continental United States is as ridiculous as the spectre of all-out alien invasion. Also, how exactly would they get from there to here??"

* Michael Mazza, research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute specializing in defense policy in the Asia-Pacific: "Obviously the premise is entirely ridiculous. There have neither the money nor the military capacity to reach us."

The full article is available here

Black Friday Now Black Thursday, But Don’t Expect the Best Bargains on Either - Reclaim Democracy

You’re just as likely to save money on most items at other times in the year.

Instead of spending time with their families on Thanksgiving this year, employees for Walmart, Target and other chains get to give thanks by selling consumerism to people who think they’re getting great deals. 

Employees of retail chains now must work on one of the only three days they traditionally haven’t had to work. Employees who don’t want to join risk drifting into part-timer purgatory or worse.

Before rushing through dessert to ditch grandma and the kids, consider research commissioned recently by the Wall Street Journal. The headline with which it reported the results tells the story succinctly: The Myth of the Black Friday Deal (applies equally to Black Thursday). As you may surmise, you’re just as likely to save money on most items at other times in the year.

Of course, the corporate push to replace a day traditionally dedicated to family with consumerism is predictable, but here’s one ray of hope: chain employees and disgusted citizens are starting to fight back.

The full article is available here

Causes Of Hunger - Bread For The World

The causes of hunger in the United States are rooted in poverty. 

Once annual food insecurity data was collected, beginning in 1995, it became clear that the ups and downs in food insecurity line up closely with the changes in poverty.  The causes of hunger in the United States are rooted in poverty. We cannot address one without also trying to solve the other.

Millions of Americans earning low wages struggle to put food on the table and make ends meet. In order to address the continuing prevalence of poverty in the U.S., we need to create good jobs for everyone who can work, provide adequate work supports, and offer incentives so low-income workers are able to save and build wealth.

The ancient Chinese maxim still rings true: Feed a man a fish and he eats for a day—teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime. Families become hunger-free when they can provide for themselves. The solution is simple: jobs that pay enough for a family to live on.

The full article is available here

Israel & Gaza: Enough! - Rabbi Michael Lerner

All the usual suspects are cheering on their respective sides in the latest struggle between Israel and Palestine being fought out at the expense of some Israeli and more Palestinian civilian lives. I’ve been overwhelmed with sadness at the tragic loss of lives and harm to the bodies of Israelis and Palestinians, and outraged at all those who continue to justify their side and demean the other, implicitly cheering on the violence even as they officially deplore it! Enough is enough.

It is time the Israelis acknowledge the cost of their Occupation and denial of fundamental democratic and human rights on the Palestinian people. Much of the Israeli media gives little attention to the ongoing violence directed at Palestinians, such as outright stealing of land from Palestinian farmers, IDF suppression of non-violent demonstrations against the Occupation, and holding Palestinians without charges.

Targeted assassinations now carried out by drones whose daily presence in the skies over Gaza make that tiny area the world’s largest outdoor prison. Ironically, except for the tiny percentage of Israelis who read Ha’aretz, most Israelis don’t even have a clue about what the daily oppressive reality is like for people in the West Bank, much less for the million plus human beings living in Gaza.

The majority of Israelis go about daily life oblivious to the suffering that the status quo generates until Palestinians launch their (thankfully mostly ineffective) missiles against hapless citizens in S’derot and other southern Israeli towns.

Hamas wants to subvert the Palestinian Authority efforts to get Palestine a higher status at the U.N. because that would make Hamas less viable in the coming Palestinian national elections. Its willingness to continue these symbolic (and more recently less symbolic and more substantive) launching of missiles against Israeli targets are not aimed at winning anything.

The full article is available here

Soundgarden: King Animal - Pop Matters

For a group of Soundgarden’s magnitude and cleverness, average is still pretty damn good.

King Animal does not sully the Soundgarden legacy. Everything we all might hope for is present: Chris Cornell’s weathered yet still sturdy wail, a weighty rhythm section, and an unending stream of detuned riffs in weird time signatures.

This time though there’s more of a conventional rockist swagger to the grooves. The reason the group moves like this? Simple: it’s having fun. It’s nice to hear how much he and his bandmates obviously enjoy playing with one another again.

Yet, King Animal doesn’t expand the Soundgarden legacy, either. It’s a record that undertakes the kind of brand-maintaining return-to-norm path fellow alt-rockers Stone Temple Pilots and Alice in Chains have embarked upon after returning from lengthy absences.  A somewhat flat mix doesn’t really help: Soundgarden pivots and parries as usual, but a better sense of dynamics is much needed to make the performances truly pop.

After roughly a decade where new great rock riffs were thin on the ground, this is one album that appears intent on redressing the balance. Listening to Cornell and Kim Thayil spool out riff after riff after riff is a pleasant reminder of just how inventive and idiosyncratic Soundgarden’s music is, using everything from detuned power chords to doubled single-note line to noisy, dissonant textures to create head-bobbing hard rock that is monolithic yet nuanced.

There really are no worlds left for Soundgarden to conquer, no great victories left to achieve beyond having a hit comeback album that isn’t crap. So we get music that is comfortably, unmistakably Soundgarden, that in the long view of the band’s career can be described as respectably average.

But for a group of Soundgarden’s magnitude and cleverness, average is still pretty damn good.

The full article is available here

'Grand Bargain' Charade Protects Corporate Welfare - Ralph Nader

Congress is still talking about a “Grand Bargain” that “balances” far more spending cuts than tax increases. That is another way of saying that you – the consumer of Medicare and Medicaid services, the recipient of Social Security, and the average taxpayer will take the brunt of the spending cuts, while the wealthy get their income taxes restored, not raised, to their pre-Bush modest levels.

There are two ways to cut Medicare and Medicaid. The right wants to cut benefits. Consumers want to cut vendor fraud, the overcharging and the immense over-diagnosis, over-treatment and erroneous or unnecessary procedures and prescriptions documented so often.

The deep bias of public dialogue here, whether in such reborn deficit-reduction commissions as Simpson-Bowles or in the general media is revealed in the use of the word “entitlements.” It is only used to apply to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which involve recycling peoples’ tax dollars.

It is not used to describe the massive corporate entitlements shoveled out daily to business welfarists in the form of subsidies, bailouts, giveaways, tax loopholes, debt revocations, loan guarantees, discounted insurance and other aid to dependent corporations. Why? Power produces privileges.

What about taxing capital gains and dividends the same as ordinary income? That was the case under Ronald Reagan.Then there is the bloated military budget, so full of redundancies, waste, boondoggle weapons programs, endless weapons cost over-runs, contracting fraud and boomeranging Empire expenditures as to boggle the minds.

So enough already of the twisted, evasive talk of the Grand Bargain on your backs. The Grand Bargain should be both Parties paying close attention to corporate welfare, corporate tax escapes, and corporate crime, fraud and abuse before unraveling the most meager social safety net in the western world.

The full article is available here

Deficit Hawk Hypocrites - Nobel-Prize Winning Economist Paul Krugman

Back in 2010, self-styled deficit hawks — better described as deficit scolds — took over much of our political discourse. At a time of mass unemployment and record-low borrowing costs, a time when economic theory said we needed more, not less, deficit spending, the scolds convinced most of our political class that deficits rather than jobs should be our top economic priority.

Recent events have also demonstrated clearly that the deficit-scold movement was never really about the deficit. Instead, it was about using deficit fears to shred the social safety net. Mr. Ryan’s alleged plans to reduce the deficit were obvious flimflam, since he was proposing huge tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations while refusing to specify how these cuts would be offset.  But to deficit scolds, his plan to dismantle Medicare and his savage cuts to Medicaid apparently qualified him as a fiscal icon.

And then there’s the matter of the “fiscal cliff.”  Contrary to the way it’s often portrayed, the looming prospect of spending cuts and tax increases isn’t a fiscal crisis. It is, instead, a political crisis brought on by the G.O.P.’s attempt to take the economy hostage.

And just to be clear, the danger for next year is not that the deficit will be too large but that it will be too small, and hence plunge America back into recession.  The truth is that deficits are actually a good thing when the economy is deeply depressed, so deficit reduction should wait until the economy is stronger.

The deficit scolds, while posing as the nation’s noble fiscal defenders, have in practice shown themselves both hypocritical and incoherent. They don’t deserve to have a central role in policy discussion; they really don’t even deserve a seat at the table.

Let's show them the door.

The full article is available here

Small Businesses Grew Twice As Fast Under Clinton Tax Rates - Travis Waldron

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), in highlighting his opposition to the letting the Bush tax cuts expire, said, “Raising taxes on small businesses will kill jobs in America,” Boehner said. “It is as simple as that.”

Economic evidence, however, contradicts that view. Under President Clinton, the top marginal tax rate was 39.6 percent, where it would return if the high-income Bush tax cuts expire at the end of the year. But small businesses grew twice as fast during Clinton’s time in office than they did when President Bush occupied the White House.

Non-partisan reports from the Congressional Budget Office and Congressional Research Service show that the expiration would have little effect on economic growth, and the Joint Committee on Taxation found that only 3 percent of small businesses would be hit by the increase.

According to a Treasury Dept. study cited by CBPP, just 7.6 percent of the income taxed at the top two income tax rates comes from actual small business income.

The full article is available here

Mandate Or No Mandate? Different Standards For Different Parties - Fair & Accuracy In Reporting

In 2004, George W. Bush won 50.7% of the popular vote over Democrat John Kerry, and had a 286-251 edge in electoral votes. Many media outlets proclaimed that to be a "mandate."  So this week Barack Obama won re-election; before the Florida results were final, he had a 303-206 electoral vote advantage and 50.5% of the popular vote. What do you call that? For a lot of people in the media, definitely not a mandate.

On CBS Evening News (11/7/12), Bob Schieffer declared, "In the hard world of American politics, the president did not get a mandate yesterday." On the NPR website (11/7/12), a headline was "For Obama, Vindication, But Not a Mandate." The Washington Post's Dan Balz (11/7/12) called it "an uncertain mandate, although Obama will attempt to claim one." While USA Today declared Bush's 2004 victory a mandate, the front-page of the paper the day after the election bore the headline "A Nation Moving Further Apart."

Time magazine's Joe Klein (11/7/12) declared that "the election was a mandate for moderation." He added: "The last month of Mitt Romney‘s campaign, when he rushed to the center and suddenly made it a race, ratified the real will of the people: a sensible centrism that runs deeper than the over-caffeinated bluster that seems to dominate the media. The election hinted that the third rail of American politics--the certain death that comes to those who question entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare--is beginning to lose its juice."

So the "will of the people" is for politicians to enact policies that are deeply unpopular?!?

It is a curious notion the media is putting forth: that the politician who wins an election should quickly move to satisfy voters who did not support his agenda. But for many in corporate media, that is what centrism is all about -- when the politician is a Democrat.

The full article is available here

How The Tea Party Helped To Pass and Protect Affordable Care Act - Ezra Klein

Some credit for the passage of the Affordable Care Act goes to the Tea Party. Harry Reid would likely have lost his majority — and his seat — in 2010 if the Tea Party hadn’t successfully knocked out top-tier challengers in Delaware, Colorado and Nevada and replaced them with more extreme conservatives. Senate Republicans would be much likelier to retake the Senate tonight if Richard Lugar and Sarah Steelman were running rather than Richard Murdock and Todd Akin.

But it’s not just that the Tea Party has been instrumental in helping Senate Democrats hold the majority necessary to protect the Affordable Care Act. It was the primary challenge against the late Sen. Arlen Specter that pushed the Pennsylvanian to switch parties, thus providing Democrats with the crucial 60th vote needed to break the Republican filibuster and pass health reform.

This is an ironic legacy of the Tea Party and the tactics it chose: It arose in ferocious opposition to Obama’s agenda, but by driving Specter out of the party and pushing harsh conservatives over more electable Republican candidates, it gave Senate Democrats the majorities they needed to pass and protect the key accomplishments of Obama’s presidency — and that’s before you get into whether the Tea Party’s influence in the Republican presidential primaries forced Mitt Romney to the right and gave Obama a crucial edge in a close presidential election.

The full article is available here

The Malalas You Don't See - Sarah Waheed

On October 24 in Northwest Pakistan, two children were injured in a drone strike authorized by President Obama. Other kids have been killed by similar strikes; Americans do not know their names. Unlike Malala Yousafzai, the teenager from the Swat Valley, who was shot by the Taliban for promoting girls’ education, Madonna did not dedicate a song to them, nor has Angelina Jolie spoken out on their behalf. No mass vigils have been held in their honor.

Instead, people like Time magazine columnist Joe Klein defend such drone attacks as justifiable pre-emptive measures to protect “our” children, with such chilling statements as “the bottom line is: in the end, whose four year old gets killed?”  Given the recent Washington Post report showing that secret kill lists are expanding under the euphemism “disposition matrix,” such rationalizations for the killing of children are disturbing.

The media attention paid to the horrific attack on Malala Yousafzai—and the close tracking of her recovery—is certainly justifiable. However, the false choice, between the drones and the Taliban, is as limited as George W. Bush’s rhetoric of “you are either with us or against us.” The nihilistic thinking of “my violence is better than your violence” also fuels the Taliban. As despicable as was the attack on Malala Yousafzai, it does not justify the drone attacks in the tribal areas of Pakistan, which continue to kill civilians like her.

If there is any doubt about the morality of drone strikes, imagine a reverse scenario. If Pakistan’s intelligence agencies were launching drone strikes into the rural Midwest with the purpose of targeting extremist militias—and in the process were killing American children with impunity—it is doubtful that most Americans would stand for it. The children injured in drone strikes are just as much victims of the ongoing war as Malala. And unless a political solution is seriously pursued instead of a secretive military one, more lives will be needlessly lost.

The full article is available here

Hurricane Sandy Blows Away Political Pretense and Ideological Nonsense - Joe Conason

When Hurricane Sandy destroyed swaths of the Atlantic coastline and darkened our largest city, the anti-government ideology of the tea party Republicans—and its panderers like Mitt Romney—was exposed as pretense and nonsense.  What we learned from Sandy is the same lesson that Katrina ought to have taught us years ago: The right wing disdain for government can imperil your health, your family’s safety and your nation’s security.

At the center of the storm’s aftermath stood New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.  None of these men is an anti-government ideologue. Surrounded by suffering and wreckage, they looked to Washington because no other power could begin to cope with the boggling problems they confront, both immediately and as they contemplate reconstruction.

America is one nation that lifts up those in pain and in need together.  The partisan divisions of a national election shouldn’t matter at such a moment, as Christie observed impatiently when a Fox News anchor suggested that he provide a photo opportunity for Romney in the disaster area.   

Disbanding FEMA apparently would be fine with Romney, who said “absolutely” when asked by CNN’s John King in a 2011 Republican debate whether he would consign disaster relief to the states rather than the federal government. For that matter he would go still further, said the former Massachusetts governor; best of all would be to let the private sector assume FEMA’s responsibilities.
 
Nobody asked Romney how a privatized FEMA would function, but it is interesting to imagine the private-equity version of disaster management—and how that entity might squeeze profit from tragedy.

The full article is available here

The Moral Priority of the Common Good - Frank Kirkpatrick

We need to re-establish the fundamental moral priority for the nation of the public or common good.

Conservative Americans seem to love candidates who speak about values. Unfortunately most of that discourse has been the language of the religious right, which focuses on personal or so-called "family" values. But at the core of a good society is the moral priority of the common good. 

Biblical tradition reminds us that ignoring the social conditions that perpetuate poverty and injustice ultimately undermines the realization of family values while destroying the bonds of mutual responsibility that constitute a good society.

The founders of the republic put the interests of the common good above the interests of the private. As historian Gordon Wood has said, “The sacrifice of individual interests to the greater good of whole formed the essence of republicanism … and the great deficiency of existing governments was precisely the sacrificing of the public good to the private greed of small ruling groups.”

If we can re-establish the fundamental moral priority for the nation of the public or common good to what the founders originally held dear and what the biblical tradition teaches, we might have a fulcrum by which to pry the American moral spirit free from the prison into which the Tea Party and severely conservative Republicans have confined it.

The full article is available here

Nonpartisan Tax Report Withdrawn After GOP Protest - Jonathan Weisman

The Congressional Research Service has withdrawn an economic report that found no correlation between top tax rates and economic growth, a central tenet of conservative economic theory, after Senate Republicans raised concerns about the paper’s findings and wording.  The report questions the premise that lowering the top marginal tax rate stimulates economic growth and job creation.

“The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie,” the report said. “However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution.”

Romney, the Republican nominee, maintains that any increase in the top tax rates on income and capital gains would slow economic growth and crush the job market’s recovery.

The pressure applied to the research service comes amid a broader Republican effort to raise questions about research and statistics that were once trusted as nonpartisan and apolitical.

Republicans have also tried to discredit the private Tax Policy Center ever since the research organization declared that Mitt Romney’s proposal to cut tax rates by 20 percent while protecting the middle class and not increasing the deficit was mathematically impossible.

The full article is available here