Obama's Underwhelming Plan to Tackle Inequality - Lynn Stuart Paramore

If you were wanting something that takes on inequality in America the way Lyndon B. Johnson took on poverty in his 1964 State of the Union address, you did not find it tonight.

Obama's plans include include raising wages to $10.10 for people making a miserly $7.25, the current Dickensian minimum. Oh, wait, he's only talking about federal contract wages. OK, really only some of them. And only the new ones.

An income of $10.10 per hour falls short of a living wage. The plan does not even match the boldness of conservative California businessman Ron Unz, who wants to raise the minimum to $12 because he doesn’t like having to pay for all the social welfare programs people have to rely on when they get paid squat.

If you were wanting something bold and butt-kicking, something that takes on inequality in America the way Lyndon B. Johnson took on poverty in his 1964 State of the Union address, you did not find it tonight.

You didn't hear about expanding Social Security, a sensible plan supported by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others. You didn't hear about getting to full employment (but you did hear some conservative rhetoric about how unemployment is really about workers not having the right skills, which has been repeatedly debunked). 

You didn't hear about bringing justice to criminal bankers who prey on hard-working Americas. You didn't hear about asking the rich to pay their fair share in taxes, or putting a financial transaction tax on Wall Street, or backing off the grotesque Trans-Pacific Partnership, or ending too-big-to-fail, or taking real action to get the money out of politics.

The full article is available here

How To Talk To A Climate Change Skeptic - Coby Beck

“How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic” is a series from Grist Magazine written by Coby Beck.  It contains responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. There are four separate taxonomies; arguments are divided by:

• Stages of Denial,
• Scientific Topics,
• Types of Argument, and
• Levels of Sophistication 

In the unpleasant event that you’re faced with someone who’s all “lol how can there be global warming it’s cold,” you could follow Grist's four-point plan for wasting your breath and not managing to change their minds. Or you could just send them this XKCD comic and let Randall Munroe do the work.

Pennsylvania Ruling Shows Problem With Voter ID Laws - Ari Berman

Pennsylvania became a case study for the problems with voter ID laws.
Judge Bernard McGinley found that the law violated the state constitution because hundreds of thousands of registered voters lacked the restrictive forms of ID required by the state, few had obtained the requisite ID since the law’s passage in March 2012, the state had not made it easy to get an ID and there was no evidence of in-person voter fraud to justify the burdens of the law.

Pennsylvania became a case study for the problems with voter ID laws. “The Voter ID Law as written suggests a legislative disconnect from reality,” McGinley wrote.

The lead plaintiff in the case, Viviette Applewhite, was a 93-year-old great-great grandmother who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and had voted in every election for the past fifty years but did not have a driver’s license and was at risk of being disenfranchised by the new law.

The state present failed evidence to justify the new voter ID law. The state “wholly failed to show any evidence of in-person voter fraud,” McGinley wrote. “Certainly a vague concern about voter fraud does not rise to a level that justifies the burdens construction here. Therefore, this Court does not find in-person voter fraud a compelling interest the Voter ID Law was designed to serve.”

The full article is available here

What Obama Didn’t Say NSA Spying Speech - Zoe Carpenter

The really significant parts of Obama’s speech were the things he did not mention. He did not call for a full stop to the bulk collection of communication records, only a transfer of ownership.

The president did not articulate a specific reason why this information needs to be collected and stored. His own intelligence review panel found that it serves no essential counter-terrorism purpose. On the other hand, the same panel (among others) emphasized the intrusiveness of bulk data collection.

Obama made a few important acknowledgements of the potential for abuse inherent in surveillance programs, but he painted a seriously misleading picture of the NSA’s recent history when he said that he’s learned nothing that “indicated that our intelligence community has sought to violate the law or is cavalier about the civil liberties of their fellow citizens.”

The full article is available here

Groups to Obama: Your Fossil Fuel-Driven Policies = Catastrophic Climate Future

18 environmental, environmental justice, and public health advocacy organizations have written a pointed letter to President Obama.

Citing the glaring gaps between his sometimes encouraging rhetoric and the realities of his fossil fuel-laden policies, eighteen environmental, environmental justice, and public health advocacy organizations have written a pointed letter to President Obama slamming his "all of the above" energy strategy as a "compromised" approach that "future generations can't afford."

“You can’t have it both ways,” said Sierra Club's executive director Michael Brune in an interview with the Washington Post, which received advanced notice of the letter that was sent to the White House on Thursday.

"In the coming months your administration will be making key decisions regarding fossil fuel development -- including the Keystone XL pipeline, fracking on public lands, and drilling in the Arctic ocean -- that will either set us on a path to achieve the clean energy future we all envision or will significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution."

The full article is available here

Advocacy For A Lifetime - Shirley Mullen

Sustained faithfulness in advocacy must be grounded in a larger life of discipline, humility, and hope if it is to endure for the long haul.

For some of us, advocacy is like a onetime cross-cultural experience. For some of us, advocacy is another way of "coming of age." It is a way of demarcating themselves from their own history.  For some of us, advocacy is a way of exerting their gifts of persuasion and organization to come out on top.

Describing these forms of advocacy in no way discounts their potential for good. We've probably all found ourselves in one or more of those forms at one time or another.  Sometimes things turn out much better than we planned for or expected. Imperfect people can be agents in accomplishing very good things in the world.

More often than not, however, our efforts do not yield what we had hoped, at least not in the short run. Far too often, well-intentioned and hardworking people do not see the results commensurate with their efforts.

The challenge for each of us is to allow advocacy to become a way of life and not a one-time experience that inoculates us against a lifetime of truly seeing the needs speaking faithfully for those who cannot speak for themselves.

Advocacy is tiring work. Results are not immediate. The work is never done. Even with occasional dramatic victories, changing the law is a long way from changing culture or changing hearts.

Sustained faithfulness in advocacy must be grounded in a larger life of discipline, humility, and hope if it is to endure for the long haul. We are sometimes called to invest our lives in causes that seem to go nowhere, because it is the right thing to do, because the tapestry of history is longer in the making than our lifetime.

The full article is available here

Everyday Life Has Been Financialized & It's Destructive - Costas Lapavitsas

Financialized capitalism is, thus, a deeply unequal system, prone to bubbles and crises — none greater than that of 2007-'09.

Evidence that financialization has come to dominate economies is offered by the global crisis of 2007-09. The crisis originated in the elephantine U.S. financial system, and was associated with speculation in housing.

For a brief period it led to serious questioning of mainstream economic theory and policy: how to confront the turmoil, and what to do about the diseased financial system; are new economic theories needed? However, after six years it is clear that very little has changed. Financialization is here to stay.

Consider, for instance, the policies to confront the crisis. First, public funds were injected into banks to boost capital. Second, public liquidity was made available to banks to sustain their operations. Third, public interest rates were driven to zero to enable banks to make secure profits by lending to their own customers at higher rates.

This extraordinary public largesse towards private banks was matched by austerity and wage reductions for workers and households. As for restructuring finance, nothing fundamental has taken place. The behemoths that continue to dominate the global financial system operate in the knowledge that they enjoy an unspoken public guarantee. The unpalatable reality is that financialization will persist, despite its costs for society.

The penetration of finance into the everyday life of households has not only created a range of dependencies on financial services, but also changed the outlook, mentality and even morality of daily life. Financial calculation evaluates everything in pennies and pounds, transforming the most basic goods — above all, housing — into "investments."

Financialized capitalism is, thus, a deeply unequal system, prone to bubbles and crises — none greater than that of 2007-'09. What can be done about it? The most important point in this respect is that financialization does not represent an advance for humanity, and very little of it ought to be preserved.

The full article is available here

P.U. litizer Prizes for 2013 - Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting

-The Sponsors Speak Award: PBS -- The January 23 episode of PBS series Nova was a mostly upbeat report on drones and surveillance. What viewers may not have known about "Rise of the Drones" was that it was funded in part by Lockheed Martin--the giant aerospace corporation that just happens to be a major drone manufacturer.

- Everyone (I Know) Is Rich: David Gregory -- During a discussion of the Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare"), NBC's Meet the Press host David Gregory (7/7/13) said that while he wasn't sure how the law would work out, he did know one thing: "Anybody who gets a paycheck in this country understands one thing, that there's a new line item. And it says Medicare surtax."

Actually, that additional Medicare tax doesn't apply to "anybody who gets a paycheck"—it applies to people making over $200,000, who are in the top 2 percent of household income.

- Deadly Website Award: Michael Shear -- The botched roll-out of the Healthcare.gov website was certainly widely covered, but it was New York Times reporter Michael Shear who thought it could be compared to a deadly hurricane that killed nearly 2,000 people (11/15/13).  Who exactly was raising this question? Shear attributes it to...a former adviser to George W. Bush. But the website = Katrina line was soon everywhere--which seemed absurd, until NBC's David Gregory explained that the more apt comparison would be the Iraq War

- Send a Union-Busting Message Award: Chris Matthews -- During a discussion about how the Obama administration should control the scandals swirling around the White House, MSNBC's Chris Matthews (Hardball, 5/14/13) brought up one president who did it right: Ronald Reagan, when he broke the PATCO air traffic controllers union in 1981.

The full article is available here