Thinking Like a Conservative: ‘Government Dependency’ - Rick Perlstein

Conservatives’ deepest convictions (however ill-founded and fundamentally flawed) determine their reaction in advance.

Never mind that the size of government is not “ever-increasing” (see here). Empirical debunking cannot reach the deepest fear of the reactionary mind, which is that the devouring leviathan, the state, will soon swallow up all traces of human volition and dignity. The conclusion is based on convictions that reason can’t shake.

"Relying on government is slavery ..."  This a consistent trope within modern conservatism.

Then there’s the old saw that the deal the Democrats supposedly offer African-Americans—you vote for us; we give you free stuff. 

And yet, despite rank anti-empirical irrationality that under-girds such convictions, conservatives believe they are immune to charges of “immorality” when it comes to denying citizens government services, because they believe “hooking” people on government services is profoundly immoral. 

Conservatives’ deepest convictions (however ill-founded and fundamentally flawed) determined their reaction in advance. Society using government to help people will be judged as an abomination.

But since genuine conservatives are in the American minority, as I wrote last month, isn’t it better to simply sin boldly, and let our conservatives devils have the hindmost? Use the state, use it well, to make people’s lives better. Do it without apology. That’s our moral imperative that should be beyond compromise.

The full article is available here

Elites Waging Brutal Class War in America - Noam Chomsky

The business classes are very class-conscious—they’re fighting a bitter class war to improve their power and diminish opposition.

The United States, to an unusual extent, is a business-run society, more so than others. The business classes are very class-conscious—they’re fighting a bitter class war to improve their power and diminish opposition.

That’s why we have a sequester over the deficit and not over jobs, which is what really matters to the population. But it doesn’t matter to the banks, so the heck with it. It also illustrates the consider- able shredding of the whole system of democracy.

If you care about other people, that’s now a very dangerous idea.  The mantra is that you should become rich, but you shouldn’t care whether other people’s kids can go to school, or can afford food to eat, or things like that. In the United States, that’s called “libertarian” for some wild reason. I mean, it’s actually highly authoritarian.

The bottom 70% or so are virtually disenfranchised; they have almost no influence on policy, and as you move up the scale you get more influence. At the very top, you basically run the show.  It’s not a big secret. Republicans try really hard to prevent people from voting, because the more people that vote, the more trouble they are in.

Private-sector unionization is very low, partly because, since Reagan, government has pretty much told employers, “You know you can violate the laws, and we’re not going to do anything about it.” Under Clinton, NAFTA offered a method for employers to illegally undermine labor organizing by threatening to move enterprises to Mexico.

When Obama declares a pay freeze for federal workers, that’s actually a tax on federal workers. It comes to the same thing, and, of course, this is right at the time we say that we can’t raise taxes on the very rich.

Take the last tax agreement where the Republicans claimed, “We already gave up tax increases.” Take a look at what happened. Raising the payroll tax, which is a tax on working people, is much more of a tax increase than raising taxes on the super-rich.

The full article is available here

Money, Needs and Resources - Miki Kashtan

Privilege works in part by masking the needs of others and habituating some segment of the population to having some of their needs met at the expense of others without even knowing this is so.

Every form of social organization includes in it implicit (or explicit) decisions about whose needs are prioritized, which needs are recognized and valued, and how resources are allocated towards meeting such needs.

Western economic theories resolve the question by not addressing it, or by assuming, implicitly, that the function of the system is to use the mechanisms of the market to meet pre-existing needs. We regularly reduce the question of whether or not human needs can be met to an empirical matter of market supply and demand.

Allocating resources on the basis of output equity is the method least tied to empathy. It’s a way of obscuring from view the fact that having fewer resources means we are less likely to be able to contribute, which means we receive less and continue to have our needs unmet. We have created a cycle which reinforces patterns of economic inequality while making them appear to be based on a just distribution. One result of such a system is insensitivity to others’ needs, and an overall decrease in empathy.

Privilege works in part by masking the needs of others and habituating some segment of the population to having some of their needs met at the expense of others without even knowing this is so. In particular, many people with privilege protect themselves from recognizing the effects of their privilege on others by attributing others’ suffering to their own actions. Thus the often-repeated talking point that people are poor because of not working hard enough.

Indeed, research indicates that people with lower income score better on measures of empathy than people of higher means. It is one thing to cultivate an abstract recognition that others have needs. It is a whole other matter for all of us who have access to privilege to give attention and consideration to how we might change our daily actions in order to be more responsive to others’ needs.

The full article is available here

ACA Hysteria: Don't Believe Canceled Insurance Hype - Michael Hiltzijk

It's time to tamp down the breathless indignation about these health plan cancellations.

Affordable Care Act critics (as well as governmentphobic corporate propagandists) are crying wolf, using the cancellation letters millions of Americans are receiving from their health insurers, informing them that their health plans won't conform to the new federal standards for health coverage as of Jan. 1.

Back in March, Consumer Reports published a study of many of these plans and placed them in a special category: "junk health insurance." Some plans, the magazine declared, may be worse than none at all.

It's time to tamp down the breathless indignation about these health plan cancellations. Many of the departing plans are being outlawed for good reason, and many of the customers losing them have no idea how much financial exposure they were saddled with in the old days. That's the real scandal in American health insurance, and the Affordable Care Act is designed, rightly, to fix it.

The full article is available here

Why Right Wing U.S. Evangelicals Salivate For "End Times" - Amanda Marcotte

While most of us would be alarmed if we thought we were facing down the apocalypse and a worldwide war that will kill millions, they can't wait.

There is a unique, strange tendency of American right wing, fundamentalist Christians to cast around looking for evidence that they will be witness to the apocalypse. The popular hymn may state that “they will know we are Christians by our love,” but when it comes to right-wing fundamentalists, a better bet to know them is by their apocalyptic revenge fantasies.

While most of us would be alarmed if we thought we were facing down the apocalypse and a worldwide war that will kill millions, people like Michelle Bachmann can't wait: “Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand.”

3 out of 4 evangelicals believe Christ will return soon. This is, of course, mostly wishful thinking—they believe they’re seeing the end of the world because they want to see the end of the world. Why would anyone want that, when the Bible they believe in predicts it will be mass murder, hellfire, and every grotesque thing imaginable?

(The fact that none of these beliefs are based on an accurate interpretation of the Bible they so readily thump seems to escape them).

1.They don’t think they’ll be around for the worst of it. Modern American fundamentalist Christians believe in something that has never before been part of Christian tradition: the Rapture. The idea is that the true believers will be whisked away into heaven before the ugly parts of the end times begin.  The idea was invented in the 19th century but has caught like wildfire in 20th Century fundamentalism and amped up in the 21st Century through fantasy films like Left Behind.

2.The end of the world would mean they get to have the last word. History will tell us that end time predictions increase when people are being persecuted or feel persecuted. While conservative Christians are most definitely not being persecuted, watching their privileged position in society justifiably decline as the equality and liberty promised in the Constitution is more fully enfranchised often makes them feel persecuted (and they whine about it to no end).

3.It provides a distraction from and an excuse to avoid the real problems in the world. The appeal of apocalypse fantasies as a genre is mainly that they help believers avoid the fear of death.  However, belief that the end times are near is used by conservatives all the time to direct their followers politically.  The prediction that the apocalypse is near has been used to defend all manner of terrible policies; everything from indifference to environmental concerns to opposition to health insurance to preferred right-wing policies in the Middle East.

4.They want to see the non-believers punished and themselves instated as the rightful rulers of all mankind. The real message for those they regard as unsaved is to thumb their nose and do a little victory dance. That’s why, after any great tragedy, there is a rush of eager-beaver charlatans willing to say this is what people have coming for being sinners (as though we all aren't sinners?!?!?)

The full article is available here

The Psychodynamics of Tea Party Success - Rabbi Michael Lerner

Here’s what I learned about why right-wing extremists are on the ascendency.

After many years as a psychotherapist studying the psycho-dynamics leading Americans to move to the Right, (before I became a rabbi and editor of Tikkun), I began to understand why a fringe and extremist group could be so successful in gathering support that would eventually lead to its ability to shut down the functioning of the government.

Here’s what I learned about why right-wing extremists are on the ascendency:

1. The Right has a coherent worldview, deeply mistaken, but nevertheless held firmly and taught widely through the media it controls and the many institutions it funds. They know what they want—the elimination of government except for its policing, fire-fighting, immigrant fighting, and military services.

2. The Democrats are perceived as wimps, because they don’t fight for what they say they believe in.  So even though temporarily they are slightly winning the battle about who is to blame for the government shut down, they keep missing opportunities to challenge the Tea Party and their supporters.

3. With the decline of American political power and economic power globally, coupled with the intense assault by the 1% on the incomes and economic security of the rest of the population and growing awareness and despair about the way climate change might be real and might lead to environmental disaster, and you get a huge amount of insecurity about the future, and a willingness to grab on to a variety of pseudo-solutions.

4. The takeover of the culture by the ethos of materialism and selfishness (which go hand-in-hand with the Social Darwinism that is Libertarianism). Rarely in history have we seen such a huge buy-in to that ideology and to the common-sense notion that people are basically ego-driven and selfish and that “what they really want is more and more things,” as we see in the media-driven culture of the 21st century.

The full article is available here

Tea Party Created Existential Threat to US, Not Affordable Care Act - Republican Justin Holbrook

Common-sense Republicans like myself understand that the Affordable Care Act is not an existential threat and doesn't deserves an existential response.

By pretending that the Affordable Care Act poses such an existential risk to the republic that it merits dragging our national character through the mud of a government shutdown, tea party Republicans are belittling the very real crises America faces.

Common-sense Republicans like myself understand that it’s not an existential threat and doesn't deserves an existential response.  Freedom of religion, speech, the press; if these freedoms are taken away – not simply re-scoped or modified by representatives who, by the way, are popularly elected – we would have an existential crisis.

We live in a democratic republic. The people elect legislators who pass legislation and a president who signs it into law. By its very nature, there are winners and losers.

Sometimes one party wins and gets the legislation it wants. Sometimes not. But most of the time we compromise. We get a little here and give a little there. We work together.  Unfortunately, it’s a lesson that tea party Republicans – caught in the fog of war and self-appointed last stands – seem to have forgotten.

The existential crisis is the one that tea party Republicans are creating. This crisis is abusing the give-and-take of the political process to such a degree that both our national pride and credit are at risk in the world. It is creating a rift in the Republican Party.

If tea party Republicans want to avoid an existential threat to the republic, they should remember that their first loyalty is not to defeating the Affordable Care Act or winning the next election. Their first loyalty is to the republic.

The full article is available here

Private Gain For The Few Trumps Public Good For The Many - Robert Reich

"Privatize" means "Pay for it yourself."

We’re losing public goods available to all, supported by the tax payments of all and especially the better-off. In its place we have private goods available to the very rich, supported by the rest of us.

A society is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on.

"Privatize" means "Pay for it yourself." The practical consequence of this in an economy whose wealth and income are now more concentrated than at any time in the past 90 years is to make high-quality public goods available to fewer and fewer.

Since the late 1970s, almost all the gains from growth have gone to the top. But as the upper-middle class and the rich began shifting to private institutions, they withdrew political support for public ones.  In consequence, their marginal tax rates dropped — setting off a vicious cycle of diminishing revenues and deteriorating quality, spurring more flight from public institutions

Outside of defense, domestic discretionary spending is down sharply as a percent of the economy. Add in declines in state and local spending, and total public spending on education, infrastructure and basic research has dropped dramatically over the past five years as a portion of GDP.

The full article is available here

The Moneyed Elite and The Crisis of Labor: Wall Street 2012-13 - James Petras

The financial crash of 2008-09 and the bailouts that followed reinforced the dominance of Wall Street over the US economy.

On July 16, 2013, Goldman Sachs, the fifth largest US bank by assets announced its second quarter profits doubled the previous year to $1.93 billion. J. P. Morgan, the largest bank made $6.1 billion in the second quarter up 32% over the year before and expects to make $25 billion in profits in 2013. Wells Fargo, the fourth largest bank, reaped $5.27 billion, up 20%. Citigroup’s profits topped $4.18 billion, up 42% over the previous year.

The financial crash of 2008-2009 and the bailouts that followed reinforced the dominance of Wall Street over the US economy. The result is that the parasitic financial sector is extracting enormous rents and profits from the economy and depriving the productive industries of capital and earnings. The recovery and boom of corporate profits since the crisis turns out to be concentrated in the same financial sector which provoked the crash a few years back.

The ascendancy of the plutocracy has been accompanied by cuts in public spending on health, education and social services. (Though painful, these cuts would be much larger and catastrophic had the regressive GOP House, steered off of the rails by the Tea Party, not been reigned in some. You may think it is coincidental that the very same plutocrats who benefit from the ascendancy of the financial sector at the expense of the common good are among those responsible for starting and funding the Astro Turf, manufactured, ill-informed rage-fest that is the Tea Party.  You would be wrong).

The bi-polar world of rich bankers in the North racking up record profits and workers everywhere receiving a shrinking share of national income spells out the class basis of “recovery” and “depression,” prosperity for the few and immiseration for the many.  This is typified by Detroit, once the cradle of both the auto industry and the organized industrial workers’ leap into the middle-class.  The big three auto companies have relocated overseas and to non-union states while the billionaire bankers “restructure” the economy, break unions, lower wages, renege on pensions and rule by administrative decree.

The full article is available here

Deficit Shrinking, Citizens Don't Know Bc Deficit Hawk Propaganda - Lynn Stuart Parramore

Disgraceful propaganda has left the public misinformed and confused.

Remember all those deficit hawks who screamed that the federal deficit is spiraling out of control and must be stopped with spending cuts that have a funny way of hurting the pocketbooks of the most vulnerable Americans?

Their excuse for ripping us off has been literally disappearing, but a new Google survey shows that not only do the vast majority Americans not know it — half of the public actually believes that the deficit is growing.

Here are the facts: The U.S. budget deficit has been shrinking at a rapid rate over the last few months. The deficit peaked at 10.2 percent of GDP in 2009, but over the past four quarters, it has shrunk to a mere 4.2 percent of GDP. What’s more, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that the deficit will fall to 2.1 percent of GDP in 2015.

Why such a disconnect? Unfortunately, disgraceful propaganda has left the public misinformed and confused.

The full article is available here

48 Years Later, Same Conservative Arguments Against Voting Rights Act - Ari Rabin Havt

One would hope that segregationists' arguments would have been relegated to the dust bin of history, rather than in use by conservatives today to defend discriminatory policies.  

Earlier this summer, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that helped force states and localities with a history of discrimination to have the Justice Department preclear proposed changes to voting regulations. Representative John Lewis (D-GA), a civil rights icon, described the decision as "a dagger in the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965."

Today marks the 48^th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson signing that act into law.

One would hope that segregationists' arguments against the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would have been relegated to the dust bin of history, rather than in use by conservatives today to defend discriminatory policies.  

Unfortunately, much of the rhetoric used to attack the law and defend the Supreme Court's decision remains rooted in the segregationist defenses of Jim Crow.

Regardless of the motives, the use of similar rhetoric shows a lack of historic perspective.

The full article is available here

Obama, Drones, and the Myth of Redemptive Violence - Steve Holt

Drone warfare demands an ethical response.

On Dec. 14, President Obama stood in the White House press room, tears in his eyes, and spoke for many Americans who had watched the terrifying events unfolding in Newtown, CT.

A little more than a month later, on Jan. 23, a pilotless aircraft owned and operated by the United States and controlled remotely by an individual on U.S. soil launched a targeted attack on the riders of two motorcycles in Yemen. The attack missed its target. It hit the house of Abdu Mohammed al-Jarrah instead, killing several people—including al-Jarrah’s two children.

There was no press conference for the al-Jarrah children.

While America’s drone program has drawn tremendous criticism from abroad and some criticism from across the U.S. political spectrum, the response from the mainstream religious community has been tepid. With the notable exception of Catholic activists who began protesting outside the Creech Air Force Base drone “battle lab” near Las Vegas as early as April 2009, there has been very little moral outrage—not only for the drone program’s civilian casualties, but also for its circumvention of legal due process.

Drone warfare demands an ethical response. These “seemingly omniscient and omnipotent camera planes, flying high above, mete out death and judgment based on images,” says theologian Sarah Sentilles.

The full article is available here

Poof! The IRS Scandal Evaporates - Andy Kroll

Liberal outfits were targeted, too.

Bad news for the Republican scandalmongers: The IRS also gave special scrutiny to groups with progressive-sounding names.

A Treasury Department inspector general found no evidence of political influence or bias. The head of the IRS division in question in Cincinnati identified himself to investigators as a "conservative Republican" and said politics played no role in their vetting decisions.

And now it turns out, as the Associated Press reported, the IRS also singled out for extra scrutiny groups applying for nonprofit status with "progressive, "occupy," and "Israel" in their name.

That is, liberal outfits were targeted, too.  IRS employees weren't only looking for conservative buzz words as they examined political nonprofit groups; they were on the watch for groups of all political stripes.

So is it case closed on the IRS debacle? Not yet. The agency still needs to explain why its staffers singled out groups in this way, and how it further intends to streamline the vetting process. But is this a liberal political conspiracy? Sure doesn't look like it.

The full article is available here

How a Nation Unwinds - Joe Klein

The past 40 years have been a time of vaulting libertarianism; we need a communitarian corrective, which seems quite impossible at this moment.

Over the past 40 years, the United States has unwound from its former rigor.  Facade has overtaken content, speculation has overtaken ­development. The middle class is sliding toward dissolution. The wealthy have become an isolated plutocracy. If it weren’t for the fact that this is America, I’d say we were pretty thoroughly cooked.

The past 40 years have been a time of vaulting libertarianism; we need a communitarian corrective, which seems quite impossible at this moment.

There was some hope, a few months ago, that we might actually get a budget this year. Both houses of Congress passed a version; it was time to hammer out the final deal. But the Republicans, following a strategy of nonsense posing as substance and nihilism posing as principle, have blocked any sort of negotiations. They have focused instead on nonscandals.  What is not being discussed in Washington?

There is no discussion of the overwhelming power and moral hazard of the five largest banks, which hold assets equal to 56% of the total U.S. economy and remain too big to fail. There is no discussion of the destructive growth of the financial sector, which is siphoning off our smartest young college graduates to create ever-more-complicated (and less substantive) investment schemes, like the collateralized debt obligations that crashed the market in 2008. There is little discussion of the decline of the middle class beyond the cliché-slinging of both sides. But where do we find the work to replace the factory jobs that sustained a prosperous middle class prior to the unwinding.

There are those, like the German historian Oswald Spengler, who believe that civilizations decay and die, that democracy ultimately lapses into plutocracy. They certainly seem to have momentum on their side these days.  We have been a nation of Henry Fords and Wright brothers. Our best hope is that, beneath the dissolution, we still are.

The full article is available here

Hey, Paul Ryan! We All Depend on Government, Even You (and Your Mom) - Peter Dreier

Ryan and his family have a long history of relying on government, just like any and all of us do.

Rep. Paul Ryan is back to his old tricks, demonizing people who rely on government to improve their lives. This week, his target was food stamp recipients.

He's already come out in favor of $20 billion in cuts that will throw an estimated two million children, elderly, and disabled Americans off food stamps. But now Ryan -- the millionaire Wisconsin Congressman who was Mitt Romney's VP running mate last year -- is pushing an amendment to eliminate food stamps for people who have $2,000 in savings, or a car worth more than $5,000.

Ryan and his family have a long history of relying on government, just like any and all of us do.

Last summer, in his speech to the GOP convention in Tampa, Ryan told a story about how, after his father's death, his mother "got on a bus every weekday for years, and rode 40 miles each morning to Madison."   He explain: “She earned a new degree and learned new skills to start her small business.It wasn't just a new livelihood. It was a new life. And it transformed my Mom from a widow in grief to a small businesswoman whose happiness wasn't just in the past. Her work gave her hope. It made our family proud. And to this day, my Mom is my role model.”

Ryan meant this as a celebration of his mother's lift-herself-by-her-own-bootstraps spirit.

But shouldn't someone remind Ryan that the bus was a public service, that the road was built and maintained by government, and that the University of Wisconsin in Madison is a public institution?

This is the Paul Ryan whose budget plan would have slashed funding for public education, roads, and public services that are the investments we need to lift people out of poverty and strengthen our economy. Now he's taking aim at the most vulnerable people in society -- food stamp recipients.

The full article is available here

In All But 6 States, You Can Be Fired For Being Victim of Domestic Violence - Bryce Covert

The loss of a job thanks to abuse can end up cutting off a lifeline to end that abuse.

Last week, Carie Charlesworth, a teacher in California and a victim of domestic violence, was fired from her job because her abusive husband invaded the school parking lot and put the school on lockdown.

While her abuser was sent to prison, she was also punished for his crime by losing her employment. The school’s action -– firing her because she is a victim of domestic abuse –- is sadly legal in most states.

Just six, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, New York, Oregon, and Rhode Island, have laws on the books that bar employment discrimination against victims of domestic abuse or sexual assault, according to an up-to-date document tracking these laws from Legal Momentum.

The loss of a job thanks to abuse can end up cutting off a lifeline to end that abuse. Three-quarters of women report staying with their abuser longer because of economic reasons.

 “We know that economic abuse is frequent in these situations, and abusers often try to get the victim fired in order to increase her financial dependency on him,” Kim Gandy, president and CEO of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, told ThinkProgress. By showing up at a partner’s workplace, in many states an abuser can put her job at risk, potentially driving her back into his arms.

The full article is available here

Supreme Court Protects Corporations From Liability At Consumer's Expense - Nicole Flatow

Another instance of the most business-friendly justices in 65 years siding with their friends.

In a 5-3 ruling with Justice Sonia Sotomayor recused, Justice Antonin Scalia eviscerated almost any opportunity small merchants have to challenge alleged monopolistic practices by American Express in their credit card agreements.

Sound familiar? Earlier this term, the court turned back on procedural grounds a lawsuit alleging monopolistic practices by Comcast. A week after that, they turned back the claims of workers to challenge employer practices as a class.

And in 2011, they issued one of the worst blows to consumer rights in years when they held that consumers challenging $30 fees could not sue together as a class. In each of these cases, the court’s procedural rulings mean the parties may never get to argue about whether these corporations actually violated the law. And as a consequence, these corporations may never be held accountable.

Today’s ruling was yet another point in the Chamber of Commerce’s remarkable tally of wins before the Roberts Court, and another chance for the most business-friendly justices in 65 years to side with their friends.

The full article is available here

Keystone XL isn’t built yet, already it’s faulty - John Upton

Already TransCanada is digging up stretches of faulty piping.

Property owners who watched with disgust and fear as TransCanada contractors ripped up their land to lay the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline are being treated to a repeat performance.

The pipeline isn’t even in service yet, but already TransCanada is digging up stretches of faulty piping and replacing them, raising fresh safety fears. T

he pipeline is intended to link up with the Keystone XL northern leg — which is still waiting for approval from the Obama administration — and then carry tar-sands oil down to refineries in Texas.

The full article is available here

Local Business Helps Communities Thrive - Stacy Mitchell

There’s a connection between the ownership structure of our economy and the vitality of our democracy.

Cities where small, locally owned businesses account for a relatively large share of the economy have stronger social networks, more engaged citizens, and better success solving problems, according to several recently published studies.

And in the face of climate change, those are just the sort of traits that communities most need if they are to survive massive storms, adapt to changing conditions, find new ways of living more lightly on the planet, and, most important, nurture a vigorous citizenship that can drive major changes in policy.

That there’s a connection between the ownership structure of our economy and the vitality of our democracy may sound a bit odd to modern ears. But this was an article of faith among 18th- and 19th-century Americans, who strictly limited the lifespan of corporations and enacted antitrust laws whose express aim was to protect democracy by maintaining an economy of small businesses.

It wasn’t until the 20th century that this tenet of American political thought was fully superseded by the consumer-focused, bigger-is-better ideology that now dominates our economic policy-making. Ironically, the shift happened just as social scientists were furnishing the first bona fide empirical evidence linking economic scale to civic engagement.
The full article is available here

Exonerated Prisoners Are Winning the Fight Against the Death Penalty - David Love

Innocence, of course, is just one reason to end executions.

Abolition in Maryland, which has executed more than 300 people, is important. It is the first state below the Mason-Dixon line to abolish the death penalty. The South accounts for 80 percent of the executions in the US.

Innocence, of course, is just one reason to end executions. The death penalty is punishment for the poor, disproportionately of color, reserved for those who cannot afford the best justice money can buy. 

Encouragingly, death penalty sentencing is on the decline. Last year saw the second lowest number of new death sentences since 1976.

Faced with the inherent brutality of the death penalty, its violation of human rights, exorbitant cost, ineffectiveness, dysfunction and incessant risk of killing innocent people, other states will follow Maryland’s example.

The full article is available here

277 Million Boston Bombings - Robert Scheer

To this day, antipersonnel weapons—the technologically refined version of the primitive pressure cooker fragmentation bombs exploded in Boston—maim and kill farmers and their children in Southeast Asia.

The horror of Boston should be a reminder that the choice of weaponry can be in itself an act of evil. President Obama made clear that “anytime bombs are used to target innocent civilians, it is an act of terror.”

Obama was right to blast the use of weapons that targeted civilians in Boston as inherent acts of terrorism, but by what standard do such weapons change their nature when they are deployed by governments against civilians?

America’s role in the deployment of antipersonnel land mines, and our country’s refusal to sign off on a ban on cluster munitions agreed to by most of the world’s nations, that offers the most glaring analogy with the carnage of Boston.

To this day, antipersonnel weapons—the technologically refined version of the primitive pressure cooker fragmentation bombs exploded in Boston—maim and kill farmers and their children in Southeast Asia.  The United States dropped 277 million cluster bomblets on Laos between 1964 and 1973.

From 2001 through 2002, the United States dropped 1,228 cluster bombs containing 248,056 submunitions in Afghanistan, and U.S. and British forces used almost 13,000 cluster munitions containing an estimated 1.8 million to 2 million submunitions during the first three weeks of combat in Iraq in 2003.

The whole point of a cluster weapon is to target an area the size of several football fields with the same bits of maiming steel that did so much damage in Boston. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which has been active in attempting to clear land of remaining bomblets, estimates 10,000 Lao civilian casualties to date from such weapons. As many as twenty-seven million unexploded bomblets remain in the country, according to the committee.

On Aug. 1, 2010, the Convention on Cluster Munitions, banning such weapons, became a matter of international law for the 111 nations, including 18 NATO members, that signed the agreement. The U.S. was not one of them. Current American policy, according to the Congressional Research Service report, is that “cluster munitions are available for use by every combat aircraft in the U.S. inventory; they are integral to every Army or Marine maneuver element and in some cases constitute up to 50 percent of tactical indirect fire support.”

The full article is available here

Austerity's Failure = Everywhere You Look - Jon Queally

Austerity leads the economy to perform more poorly.

The last week has been a flurry of headlines decrying the complete and utter failure of the 'austerity experiment' across the globe, with an influential academic paper from Harvard economists becoming the poster-child not only of poor scholarship but also failed common sense.

As New York Times columnist and Nobel economist Paul Krugman notes:

"The austerian position has imploded; not only have its predictions about the real world failed completely, but the academic research invoked to support that position has turned out to be riddled with errors, omissions and dubious statistics.

The academic research mentioned is the work of Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, which was revealed last week to be riddled with spread sheet errors that vastly undercut the paper's conclusion. Those faulty conclusions, however, were widely used by pro-austerity policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic to justify slashing public spending, imposing harsh cuts on social programs and worker benefits."

In a Bloomberg interview earlier this month Columbia University's Joseph Stiglitz was blunt about the historical record. “There is no instance of a large economy getting to growth through austerity," he said. "Austerity leads the economy to perform more poorly. It leads to more unemployment, lower wages, more inequality.”

The Reinhart and Rogoff paper was not used only to argue for cuts to popular social insurance programs, it was also used to argue against government efforts to boost the economy and create jobs.

You get the idea: The austerity agenda looks a lot like a simple expression of upper-class preferences, wrapped in a facade of academic rigor. What the top 1% wants becomes what economic science says we must do.

The full article is available here

What if the Tsarnaevs Had Been the "Boston Shooters"? - John Cassidy

Yes, this is only a counter-factual exercise, which, like all such riffs, shouldn’t be taken too literally. But it’s hard to think about it for long without coming to the conclusion that there’s something askew with the way we think about and react to various types of extreme violence, and the weapons used in such episodes.

In a country where each life (and death) is supposed to count equally, surely the victims of gun violence should be accorded the same weight as the victims of bomb violence. And the perpetrators should get equal treatment, too. But, of course, that’s not how things work. 

Most Americans associate bomb attacks with terrorists. When they hear of mass shootings, they tend to think of sociopaths and unbalanced post-adolescents. If the Tsarnaevs had managed to carry out a gun massacre unharmed and escaped, their identities unknown, would the first presumption have been that the shooters were Islamic extremists? Or would people have looked in another direction?

Terrorism, especially homegrown terrorism, is a minor threat to public safety and public health. It pales in comparison to gun violence.

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Our Souls And A Planet's Worth of Suffering - Bill Hodgeman

I don't think that the human soul was made to sustain information about a planet's worth of suffering--everyday--when, in most cases, there's nothing we can do about it. 

For most of history, people were only aware of the tragedies that happened in their own communities, and in most cases, they COULD do something about it. 

Lopsided Information- Action ratios are bad for the soul.

Boston bombing: Bad journalism fuels terrorism hysteria - Robin Abcarian

What is wrong with the New York Post?

Thursday morning, the tabloid newspaper’s front page featured a huge photo of two young men with backpacks, with the giant headline: “Bag Men: Feds seek these two pictured at Boston Marathon.”

In the online story, the pair’s faces had big red circles around them. Yes, sort of like targets. Turns out, the young men had nothing to do with the blasts.  After an appropriate hail of criticism, Post Editor Col Allan, incredibly, defended his decision to smear two innocent men. And yes, that was a smear.

By making a lame pun about their backpacks, the Post leaped past any kind of journalistic restraint and implied the men were suspects in the case. How could you read the photo and the giant headline any other way?

Claims feed into stereotypes and affirm our worst prejudices. A Saudi Arabian kid running from the blast must be the suspect. A couple of swarthy backpack-toting kids watching the race must be the suspects.  The New York Post promulgated both those stories.

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Oklahoma Grandmother Bike-Locks Herself to KXL Pipeline Machinery - Jacob Chamberlain

Zorn was eventually removed from the equipment by local police and taken into custody.

Oklahoma grandmother Nancy Zorn, 79, locked herself to a piece of heavy machinery Tuesday morning in protest of TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline construction, halting work on a construction site of the tar sands harbinger for several hours.

“Right now our neighbors in Arkansas are feeling the toxic affect of tar sands on their community. Will Oklahoma neighborhoods be next?” Zorn asked, referring to the thousands of barrels of tar sands oil which spilled out of an Arkansas pipeline last week.

“I can no longer sit by idly while toxic tar sands are pumped down from Canada and into our communities. It is time to rise up and defend our home. It is my hope that this one small action today will inspire many to protect this land and our water.”

Zorn was eventually removed from the equipment by local police and taken into custody.

Zorn is the second Oklahoma grandmother this year risking arrest to stop construction of the pipeline, Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance said Tuesday. The action is part of a series of civil disobedience actions against the pipeline construction led by the group.

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Paul Ryan’s Regressiveness Part II - Robert Reich

Austerity economics — of which Ryan’s upcoming budget is the most extreme version — is a cruel hoax. 

Republicans lost the election but they still shape what’s debated in Washington — the federal budget deficit and so-called “fiscal responsibility.”

The White House’s and the Democrat’s continuing failure to reshape that debate has lead directly and logically to Paul Ryan’s budget plan this week, which is a more regressive version of the same plan American voters resoundingly rejected last November.

Sadly, the President is playing into the GOP’s hands with a new round of negotiations over a “grand bargain.”  Despite February’s encouraging job numbers, the major challenge is still jobs, wages, growth, and widening inequality — not deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility.

Austerity economics — of which Ryan’s upcoming budget is the most extreme version — is a cruel hoax. Cruel because it hurts most those who are already hurting; a hoax because it doesn’t work.

So why even try for a “grand bargain” that won’t deal with these fundamentals but only further legitimize the GOP mythology and further mislead the public about what’s really at stake?

The full article is available here

You: Doing More With Less, Corporate Profits: Going Strong

What's good for American business isn't necessarily good for Americans.

The Dow hit a record high this week, but who's winning? In all the chatter about our "jobless recovery," how often does someone explain the simple feat by which this is actually accomplished?

US productivity increased twice as fast in 2009 as it had in 2008, and twice as fast again in 2010: workforce down, output up, and voilá! No wonder corporate profits are up 22 percent since 2007.  Americans' disposable income has inched ahead 1.4% by comparison.  So far in this recovery, corporations have captured an unusually high share of the income gains.

The word "productivity" is a term insidious in both its usage and creep. And so we kowtow to—nay, embrace—a cultural maxim that just happens to be enormously convenient to corporate America. The not-so-subtle implication is always: Don't you want to be a productive member of society? 

Except what's good for American business isn't necessarily good for Americans. We're not just working smarter, but harder. And harder. And harder, to the point where the driver is no longer American industriousness, but something much more predatory.

Just counting work that's on the books (never mind those 11 pm emails), Americans now put in an average of 122 more hours per year than Brits, and 378 hours (nearly 10 weeks!) more than Germans. The differential isn't solely accounted for by longer hours, of course—worldwide, almost everyone except us has, at least on paper, a right to weekends off, paid vacation time and paid maternity leave. (The only other countries that don't mandate paid time off for new moms are Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Samoa, and Swaziland.)

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The Sequester & The Tea Party Plot - Robert Reich

Sequestration is only the start.

Imagine a plot to undermine the government of the United States, to destroy much of its capacity to do the public’s business, and to sow distrust among the population.

Imagine further that the plotters infiltrate Congress and state governments, reshape their districts to give them disproportionate influence in Washington, and use the media to spread big lies about the government.

Finally, imagine they not only paralyze the government but are on the verge of dismantling pieces of it.

Far-fetched? Perhaps. But take a look at what’s been happening in Washington and many state capitals since Tea Party fanatics gained effective control of the Republican Party, and you’d be forgiven if you see parallels.

Sequestration is only the start. What they set out to do was not simply change Washington but eviscerate the U.S. government — “drown it in the bathtub,” in the words of their guru Grover Norquist – slashing Social Security and Medicare, ending worker protections we’ve had since the 1930s, eroding civil rights and voting rights, terminating programs that have helped the poor for generations, and making it impossible for the government to invest in our future.

The full article is available here

Aisle be damned: How Big Food dominates your supermarket choices - by Andy Bellatti

They have been able to become so large because of the evisceration of antitrust law during the Reagan administration.

Just 20 companies produce most of the food eaten by Americans (yes, even organic brands). These companies are so large, they have the economic and political power to dictate food policy, from laws on advertising junk food to children and manipulating nutrition standards to weakening federal pesticide regulations and blocking the labeling of genetically engineered foods.

They have been able to become so large because of the evisceration of antitrust law during the Reagan administration. And since that time, no U.S. president has been willing to tackle the issue of concentration. This is ironic since all of the rhetoric about our economic system revolves around competition in the marketplace.

Ultimately, to create a fair and healthy food system we need to build the political power to create commonsense regulations — and enforce them — for food safety and labeling, antitrust policy, biotechnology, and other new technologies used in the food system. This means having our eye on the long-term prize of a regulatory system that really works. Laying out what this ideal regulatory system should look like also creates more political space for achieving short-term goals and mobilizing more people. Activists are really tired of fighting for just the best they can get in the latest fight over some terrible deregulation scheme dreamed up by corporate interests and pushed by governmentphobes. We must fight for what we really want.

The full article is available here

Battles of the Budget and a War Between the Classes - Paul Krugman

The fight over the fiscal cliff was just one battle in that war.

Our 2 major political parties are engaged in a fierce struggle over the future shape of American society. Democrats want to preserve the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — and add to them what every other advanced country has: a more or less universal guarantee of essential health care. Republicans want to roll all of that back, making room for drastically lower taxes on the wealthy.

The fight over the fiscal cliff was just one battle in that war. It ended, arguably, in a tactical victory for Democrats; mainly because of what didn’t happen: There were no benefit cuts.. The question is whether it was a Pyrrhic victory that set the stage for a larger defeat.  Progressives, always worried that President Obama seems much too willing to compromise about fundamentals, breathed a sigh of relief.

There were also some actual positives from a progressive point of view. Expanded unemployment benefits were given another year to run, a huge benefit to many families and a significant boost to our economic prospects (because this is money that will be spent, and hence help preserve jobs). Other benefits to lower-income families were given another five years — although, unfortunately, the payroll tax break was allowed to expire, which will hurt both working families and job creation.

So why are many progressives — myself included — feeling very apprehensive? Because we’re worried about the confrontations to come.  According to the normal rules of politics, Republicans should have very little bargaining power at this point.  But the G.O.P. retains the power to destroy, in particular by refusing to raise the debt limit — which could cause a financial crisis. And Republicans have made it clear that they plan to use their destructive power to extract major policy concessions.

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2012: The Year Cities Stood Up To Climate Change — and Took A Beating - Greg Hanscom

A year ago, as the curtain was closing on 2011, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg stood in front of an audience at the United Nations and declared that it would be cities, not national governments, that would lead the fight against climate change. “As mayors — the great pragmatists of the world’s stage and directly responsible for the well-being of the majority of the world’s people — we don’t have the luxury of simply talking about change but not delivering it,” he said.

2012 would prove Bloomberg right. It would also lay bare just how far we still have to go before cities like New York are prepared for he havoc climate change is wreaking — and how hard urban leaders in the U.S. will have to fight to get help from Washington on this and a whole host of other issues. In the closing days of 2012, we watched Republicans in Congress balk at funding disaster relief after superstorm Sandy barreled into New York, inflicting tens of billions of dollars in damage along the Eastern Seaboard.

In recent decades, the U.S. has turned its back on urban areas, pouring billions into car-centric suburbs while allowing inner cities to crumble. As with climate change, we understand what it will take to assuage many of our cities’ worst problems — joblessness, poverty, crime — and yet we’re content to turn a blind eye, dismiss these as someone else’s problem. Many Republicans go so far as to call any policy that would help cities part of the bogus “war on the suburbs.” Urban sustainability efforts, they say, are a United Nations plot to destroy the American way of life.

In truth, cities are the key to battling the climate conundrum, as Alex Steffen eloquently points out in his new book, Climate Zero, published in Grist last month. The question for Americans — for our national and local leaders, for millennial urbanophiles, and baby boomers who say they want to live in cities again — is whether we’re really ready to commit to making our cities work again. The answer to that question will have huge implications not just for our cities, but for our warming planet as well.

The full article is available here