Dark Days with the Dark Knight - David Sterritt

The recent mass shootings bears out the need to get beyond simplistic attacks on popular culture. When social chaos grabs the headlines, it’s easier to blame movies than to examine root causes like the disintegrating safety net for families and maxed-out mental-health facilities.

What’s really going on with violent entertainment has deep roots in the American psyche. In some respects the present-day United States is a nasty place: look at the amount of gun violence, the grotesque influence of the National Rifle Association, the amount of violence by other means, the astounding number of people in jails and prisons, the number of people executed each year, the proliferation of domestic poverty, the ability of wealth to shape public policy, the accelerating decline of the middle and working classes, the horrifically large number of innocent people killed as a result of the Iraq invasion, the use of torture as an interrogation and punishment device, the embrace of indefinite detention for people not convicted (or even accused) of crimes, the acceptance of a permanent state of war against anyone declared to be The Enemy, and on and on.

I find it hard to imagine how anyone can place those factors on one side of the scale, and put violent films on the other, and then say the Columbine or Virginia Tech or Batman shooters did what they did because movies got them all excited.

What’s needed now is not just a less violent cinema but a more intelligent cinema that dares to think about issues and to encourage thinking in its audience. We are the beneficiaries of the most advanced audiovisual systems ever known, capable of moving our emotions, challenging our ideas, and opening our imaginations. Is it right that the most technologically sophisticated and financially expensive products of this system are entertainments like the Batman movies, designed to deliver their gratifications not to the mind but to the gut? Surely our entertainment industry can aspire to greater things.

The full article is available here

Yes, More Solyndras for Clean Energy - Michael Grunwald from Time Business

The solar company failed, but the decision to invest in it was the right one.

The Solyndra “scandal” is trotted out every few months as part of the big-vs.-small-government debate in this country, but it is not and never was a scandal. The federal clean-energy loan program that the infamous solar-panel maker was a part of was designed to finance risky ventures, and Solyndra was a reasonable risk.

The Bush and Obama Administrations both selected Solyndra from 143 applicants for the program’s first loan, and investigators found no evidence that political interference made that happen.

But no matter how often independent fact checkers debunk charges of crony capitalism, Washington Republicans won’t be deterred from pushing a No More Solyndras Act, vowing to kill the loan program. Government aid isn’t supposed to guarantee success; subsidized farms and entrepreneurs with Small Business Administration loans fail all the time. Some students who receive Pell Grants probably end up drunks on the street.

There’s a legitimate debate to have about Solyndra and green industrial policy, but it’s not the debate over imaginary corruption we’ve been having. Solar power has increased over 600% since 2009, partly because of the low prices that doomed Solyndra. The $90 billion for clean energy in the stimulus actually crowded in private investment, luring an additional $100 billion in matching funds from the sidelines.

Yet Republicans haven’t argued against subsidies for manufacturing. In fact, they’ve argued that the stimulus shipped manufacturing jobs overseas, which is ludicrous. It has increased the domestic content of U.S. wind turbines from 20% to 60%. Politics aside, that’s a good thing. It would be a shame to trade our dependence on foreign oil for dependence on foreign turbines, solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, all products that were invented in the U.S.

The full article is available here

Republicans’ Anti-Government Rhetoric Comes Back to Bite Republican Governments - Ed Kilgore

Anyone who’s lived in metropolitan Atlanta knows its infamously snarled highway traffic. But any Georgian also knows that it would be impossible to raise taxes to do something about it—at least since 2004, when Republicans achieved control of both the legislative and executive branches of state government for the first time since Reconstruction.

Last week’s calamitous defeat of a sales-tax-for-transportation referendum in metro Atlanta and most of the state showed that when push comes to shove, Republican governing can’t survive the Republicans’ anti-governing message. Having spent years demonizing higher taxes and government spending, Georgia Republicans were in a poor position to ask for more of both for any purpose under the sun.

The Georgia experience matters nationally for a simple reason: Since 2008, the GOP and its business allies have energized its movement-conservative base (rechristened as the Tea Party Movement) to savagely fight for radically reduced public spending. Now, when increased public investments and the revenues necessary to pay for them are obviously essential to keep a state economy growing, Republicans can no longer dial back the rhetoric.

If Republicans conquer Washington in November and Republican-controlled state governments derive the bitter harvest of radically reduced federal support for public services, it will be interesting to see if a “governing wing” of the GOP survives at all in state capitals around the country. And it will be equally interesting to see whether business interests are happy with obtaining better tax rates and less regulation in exchange for dysfunctional government from sea to shining sea.

The full article is available here

High-Capacity Semiautomatic Handguns: Weapon of Choice for Mass Shootings - Greg McCune

The semiautomatic handgun used in the deadly attack on a Wisconsin Sikh temple is the same type used in other recent U.S. mass shootings, including one at a theater in Colorado, and the attack on a congresswoman in Arizona, gun experts said.

Wisconsin shooter Wade Michael Page used a Springfield 9mm semiautomatic handgun to carry out the attack at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, officials said. As in several other recent mass shootings, the gun had been purchased legally, at a Milwaukee-area gun store called the Shooter Shop.

James Holmes, the man accused of killing 12 people in a shooting spree last month at a theater in Aurora, Colorado, used one .40-caliber Glock handgun and had another one in his car.  Jared Loughner, who is accused of killing six people and critically wounding Representative Gabrielle Giffords in a January 2011 attack in Tucson, Arizona, used a Glock 9 mm semiautomatic pistol with a magazine that held more than 30 bullets.

Seung-hui Cho, the Virginia Tech University student who killed 32 people and then committed suicide in 2007, also used a Glock semiautomatic handgun.  The common thread binding the mass attacks together is that they all used semiautomatic handguns with high-capacity magazines.

Semiautomatic handguns are the weapon of choice for mass murderers because they are light and easy to conceal, and adaptable to using high-capacity magazines, experts say. This allows the shooter to fire the maximum number of bullets in a short period of time.

The full article is available here

Crazy Weather: 'Virtually No Other Explanation Than Climate Change' - Common Dreams

A statistical climate change analysis led by NASA's James Hansen, which will be presented in a report released Monday on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that recent extreme weather events are not anomalies, but rather the result of a systemic climate change patterns fueled by man-made global warming.

The new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.

In an op-ed published on Saturday, Hansen explained that the new analysis, which looked at the past six decades:

revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.

This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.

The full article is available here

The Book of Jobs - Joseph E. Stiglitz

It has now been almost five years since the bursting of the housing bubble, and four years since the onset of the recession. Wages are falling—the real income of a typical American household is now below the level it was in 1997.

We knew the crisis was serious back in 2008. The banks got their bailout. Some of the money went to bonuses. Little of it went to lending. And the economy didn’t really recover.

Even if we fully repair the banking system, we’ll still be in deep trouble—because we were already in deep trouble. The fact is the economy in the years before the current crisis was fundamentally weak, with the housing bubble, and the unsustainable consumption to which it gave rise, acting as life support.

The trauma we’re experiencing right now resembles the trauma we experienced 80 years ago, during the Great Depression, and it has been brought on by an analogous set of circumstances. Then, as now, we faced a breakdown of the banking system. But then, as now, the breakdown of the banking system was in part a consequence of deeper problems.

The problem today is the so-called real economy. It’s a problem rooted in the kinds of jobs we have, the kind we need, and the kind we’re losing, and rooted as well in the kind of workers we want and the kind we don’t know what to do with. The real economy has been in a state of wrenching transition for decades, and its dislocations have never been squarely faced.

The full article is available here

Is Algebra Necessary - Andrew Hacker in The New York Times

Algebra is an onerous stumbling block for all kinds of students: disadvantaged and affluent, black and white. Why do we subject students to this ordeal?

Of course, people should learn basic numerical skills: decimals, ratios and estimating, sharpened by a good grounding in arithmetic. But a definitive analysis by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce forecasts that in the decade ahead a mere 5 percent of entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra or above.

It's not clear that the math we learn in the classroom has any relation to the quantitative reasoning we need on the job. John P. Smith III, an educational psychologist at Michigan State University who has studied math education, has found that “mathematical reasoning in workplaces differs markedly from the algorithms taught in school.” 

Algebra is an onerous stumbling block for all kinds of students: disadvantaged and affluent, black and white. Why do we subject students to this ordeal?  Instead of investing so much of our academic energy in a subject that blocks further attainment for much of our population, I propose that we start thinking about alternatives.

There is no reason to force everyone to grasp vectorial angles and discontinuous functions. Think of math as a huge boulder we make everyone pull, without assessing what all this pain achieves.

So why require it, without alternatives or exceptions? Thus far I haven’t found a compelling answer.

The full article is available here

What Explains Moral Leaders' Silence On Climate Change? - Bill McKibben

Climate change—the biggest thing ever to happen on our planet—strikes me as a test not just of whether the big brain was a good adaptation, but also whether it’s attached to a big enough heart to matter.

In June, a team of prominent scientists published a long article in Nature.  It concluded that people have so disturbed the operations of the planet that it's nearing—perhaps within decades—a “state shift” to a new biological paradigm unlike any human civilization has ever encountered.

The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products, and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations.

What’s surprising is not the science. It’s the endless lack of reaction to it. I didn’t hear any reaction at all from the nation’s clerics.  The whole first page of their sacred text is about nothing but creation, the fact that God made everything around us, pronounced it good, and told us to take care of it.

Which we manifestly haven’t done. We haven’t exercised careful dominion, we’ve just trashed the place. All those creeping beasts and birds of the air? We’re wiping them out at a rate accomplished in the past only by asteroids. And in the process we’re doing more damage to the least among us than any other people who’ve come before.

What explains the mealy-mouthed silence of our moral leaders? I have no idea.

Climate change—the biggest thing ever to happen on our planet—strikes me as a test not just of whether the big brain was a good adaptation, but also whether it’s attached to a big enough heart to matter. At this point the scientists have done all they can to speak for the brain; our religious leaders have done precious little to make the case for the heart.

The full article is available here

Old Man Gloom: NO - Craig Hayes

Old Man Gloom was on hiatus for eight years, but, earlier in 2012, the band emerged to play a series of shows, where its previously hinted-at new album was put on sale for fans in advance of its full release. Eight years is an excruciatingly long time without a release from Old Man Gloom, and the band has rewarded fans with its most compositionally adventurous album yet. Its distinctive slough was produced by the consistently laudable Kurt Ballou, whose work raises Old Man Gloom’s noisome vapors to choking levels.

Old Man Gloom has always intertwined bludgeoning weight with the prospect of emotional disintegration. NO takes that familiar sense of imminent crisis, and marries it to an even greater sense of dread. While the desire to instill trepidation is often defeated in metal by clumsy cliché, Old Man Gloom is far too astute to use tired old routines. It comes as no surprise to find that NO worms its way into your brain easily, picking at uncomfortable fears along the way.

The full article is available here

"The Government Can't Do Anything Right" - from the blog New Appeal To Reason

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

I then took a shower in the clean water provided by a municipal water utility.

After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

I watched this while eating my breakfast of U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time, as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.

On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and Fire Marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.

And then I log on to the internet -- which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration -- and post on Freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right.

You can read more here

Climate Reality Bites: Gen-Xers Don’t Care Much About Global Warming - John Upton

Members of Generation X are responding in a disturbing way to climate change — with a big, collective shrug of indifference.  Only 22 percent expressed “high concern” about climate change in a 2011 survey [PDF] of about 3,000 Gen-Xers in their late 30s. This despite the fact that “Generation X is the most scientifically literate and best educated generation in American history,” according to lead researcher Jon D. Miller.

Ooh, more disappointing news for you: The latest survey results indicate that Generation Xers with children actually pay less attention to climate change news than other members of their generation.  Miller attributed that surprising finding to the heavy demands of parenting in modern America.

David Herring, a science communicator in NOAA’s climate office, said mainstream media’s coverage of climate change confuses many people and causes them to tune the topic out of their minds.

The full article is available here

The Magna Carta And The Shredding Of The Common Good - Noam Chomsky

Recent events trace a threatening trajectory, sufficiently so that it may be worthwhile to look ahead a few generations to the millennium anniversary of one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights: the issuance of Magna Carta, the charter of English liberties imposed on King John in 1215.

A lesser known portion of the document is the Charter of the Forest.  It demanded protection of the commons from external power. The commons were the source of sustenance for the general population – their fuel, their food, their construction materials. The Forest was no wilderness. It was carefully nurtured, maintained in common, its riches available to all, and preserved for future generations.

The Charter of the Forest imposed limits to privatization. By the 17th century however, it had fallen victim to the commodity economy and capitalist practice and morality. No longer protected for cooperative care and use, the commons were restricted to what could not be privatized – a category that continues to shrink before our eyes.

The rise of capitalist practice and morality brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are treated, and also of how they are conceived.  Its goal was to protect the source of sustenance for the population, the commons, from external power -- in the early days, royalty; over the years, enclosures and other forms of privatization by predatory corporations and the state authorities who cooperate with them, have only accelerated and are properly rewarded.

Politics today has been reduced to a lucrative venture where one looks out mainly for returns on investment rather than on what one can contribute to rebuild highly degraded environments, communities, and a nation.  Congressional Republicans are dismantling the limited environmental protections initiated by Richard Nixon, who would be something of a dangerous radical in today’s political scene.

The full article is available here

Fox And Romney Tag-Team False Small-Business Attack On Obama - Simon Maloy

Last week in Virginia, President Obama made a fairly basic point about succeeding in business: you benefit not just from your own initiative, but also from the successes and contributions of others, including government.

Since then, Fox News has led the way in tearing two sentences of Obama's argument out of context and distorting them to claim that the president said small business owners deserve no credit for their own success.  Now the Romney campaign has picked up Fox News' distortion of Obama's comments, and Fox News is reporting on Romney's use of the false attack they helped create.

Yesterday morning's Fox & Friends aired a deceptively edited clip of Obama's remarks, which host Gretchen Carlson called "startling."

Campaigning in Pennsylvania this afternoon, Romney himself repeated the distortion of Obama's remarks, and characterized it as "insulting to every entrepreneur, every innovator in America and it's wrong."And shortly afterward, on Studio B, Fox News chief political correspondent Carl Cameron reported on how Romney attacked the president using the same quote his colleagues enthusiastically distorted.

The full article is available here

Obama Taken Wildly Out Of Context On "Building Business" By Cooperation-phobes - Benjy Sarlin

Mitt Romney and an array of surrogates are mocking President Obama for remarks he made defending public investments in infrastructure, accusing him of arrogantly claiming credit for small businesses’ hard work and risk-taking. But it takes an Olympic-level gymnastic leap to make the attack work as advertised.  

The Romney campaign is seizing on an out-of-context line the president said at a campaign event in Virginia on Friday: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Or, as a Romney press release blared: “OBAMA, TO BUSINESS OWNERS: ‘YOU DIDN’T BUILD THAT.’”

Sounds pretty bad — and it is, if you leave out the sentences directly before and after, which make it crystal clear Obama wasn’t talking about building businesses at all. The “that” in “you didn’t build that” referred to roads, bridges, infrastructure, education, emergency services and law and order — all services that protect and enable business owners along the way toward creating a successful operation.

The full article is available here

Obama = Smallest Government Spender Since Eisenhower -- Rick Ungar, Forbes

Amidst all the cries of Barack Obama being the most prolific big government spender the nation has ever suffered, Marketwatch is reporting that our president has actually been tighter with a buck than any United States president since Dwight D. Eisenhower.

So, how have the Republicans managed to persuade Americans to buy into the whole “Obama as big spender” narrative?

In the first year of the Obama presidency, the federal budget increased a whopping 17.9% —going from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. I’ll bet you think that this is the result of the Obama sponsored stimulus plan that is so frequently vilified by the conservatives ... but you would be wrong.

The first year of any incoming president term is saddled—for better or for worse—with the budget set by the president whom immediately precedes the new occupant of the White House. Indeed, not only was the 2009 budget the property of George W. Bush—and passed by the 2008 Congress—it was in effect four months before Obama took the oath of office.

If you are truly interested in a fair analysis of the Obama years to date—at least when it comes to spending—you’re going to have to acknowledge that under the Obama watch, even President Reagan would have to give our current president a thumbs up when it comes to his record for stretching a dollar.

The full article is available here

Rotten To The Core - Nick Penniman

Late last year, President Obama made a pilgrimage of sorts to the sleepy town of Osawatomie, Kansas, to talk about the economy. He went there because it’s where, in 1910, Teddy Roosevelt gave one of his most famous speeches, called “The New Nationalism,” which was, in part, an attempt to unite his party around a common vision of a well-managed economy.

A few minutes in, he quoted from Roosevelt’s speech: “‘Our country,’” Obama said, “‘means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy ... of an economic system under which each [person] shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him [or her].’”

But, notice those ellipses. What he omitted was an important phrase from the original quote: “the triumph of popular government.” Five words may not seem like much. Perhaps the president felt as if “real democracy” said enough, or perhaps his speechwriters felt as if it wouldn’t be politically prudent for him to speak so highly of government. But the omission also points to a larger exclusion, not just in Obama’s speech, but in his presidency and, most significantly, in our country’s priorities.

Here’s how Roosevelt defined such priorities in his Osawatomie speech:

 “At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the [people] who possess more than they have earned and the [people] who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen [and women] to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will.”

Roosevelt knew that what stood in the way of his goals—his vision of America—was the control of Washington by the lobbyists and the economic elite, and that to “advance humanity” we first had to regain “the right of self-government.” As all history students know, he sure did fight to regain that right. In fact, by 1910 Roosevelt could have been resting on his reform laurels—three years earlier, he had forced the passage of the Tillman Act, which, as the first major piece of campaign finance reform legislation in history, banned corporate contributions to campaigns.

While the problem of money in politics was bad in Roosevelt’s day, it’s much worse today. Two years ago the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision empowered corporations’ involvement in politics in unprecedented ways. But it’s unclear if President Obama understands as clearly as Roosevelt did that the fight for a better America begins with the fight to “gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests.”

The full article is available here

People Like Affordable Care Act Once They Know What's In It - Joshua Holland

There are two Affordable Care Acts. There's the legislation passed by Congress in 2009, and then there's the mythical Obamacare – the perfidious “government takeover” decried and demagogued by so many conservatives.

A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation asked about 12 specific provisions in the legislation, and found that, on average, 63 percent of respondents approved of the nuts and bolts of the Affordable Care Acts.  The poll found that the most popular parts of the law were also the ones most Americans weren't aware of, and vice-versa.  Fewer than half of those polled knew about the law's tax credits for small businesses that offer their employees coverage, a provision that eight out of 10 people liked when they heard about it.

None of this should come as a surprise, given the level of mendacity of the law's opponents. If the Affordable Care Act did in fact feature “death panels,” resulted in deep cuts to Medicare, represented a "massive” tax increase and “Sovietized” our healthcare system, nobody would support it. Fortunately, none of that bears any resemblance to reality.

Like the idea of government itself, people are suspicious of the Affordable Care Act as an abstraction, but when it gets to the specifics they tend to like it a lot better.

The full article is available here

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: "Congress Followed Massachusett's Lead" - Tim Murphy

The Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act by a 5 to 4 vote. GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, responding to the ruling in front of the US Capitol, reiterated his pledge to spend his hypothetical first day in office working to repeal the Affordable Care Act. 

Romney, the only other elected official in American history to mandate that citizens buy health insurance, probably won't like this passage from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's opinion:

By requiring most residents to obtain insurance, see Mass. Gen. Laws, ch. 111M, §2 (West 2011), the Commonwealth ensured that insurers would not be left with only the sick as customers. As a result, federal lawmakers observed, Massachusetts succeeded where other States had failed.  See Brief for Commonwealth of Massachusetts as Amicus Curiae in No. 11–398, p. 3 (not­ing that the Commonwealth’s reforms reduced the number of uninsured residents to less than 2%, the lowest rate in the Nation, and cut the amount of uncompensated care by a third); 42 U. S. C. §18091(2)(D) (2006 ed., Supp. IV) (noting the success of Massachusetts’ reforms). In cou­pling the minimum coverage provision with guaranteed­ issue and community-rating prescriptions, Congress followed Massachusetts' lead.

In a sane political climate, Mitt Romney would happily take credit for this. As it stands, he's in the uncomfortable position of once more distancing himself from his biggest political accomplishment.

The full article is available here

How Many Americans Are Killed by Terrorism? - Micah Zenko

The number of U.S. citizens who died in terrorist attacks increased by two between 2010 and 2011; overall, a comparable number of Americans are crushed to death by their televisions or furniture each year. This is not to diminish the real—albeit shrinking—threat of terrorism, or to minimize the loss and suffering of the 13,000 killed and over 45,000 injured around the world. For Americans, however, it should emphasize that an irrational fear of terrorism is both unwarranted and a poor basis for public policy decisions.

This data was included the National Counter Terrorism Center's just-released 2011 Report on Terrorism. The report offers the U.S. government’s best statistical analysis of terrorism trends through its Worldwide Incidents Tracking System (WITS), which compiles and vets open-source information about terrorism

Here are a few points worth highlighting that notably contrast with the conventional narrative of the terrorist threat:

“In cases where the religious affiliation of terrorism casualties could be determined, Muslims suffered between 82 and 97 percent of terrorism-related fatalities over the past five years.”

Of 978 terrorism-related kidnapping last year, only three hostages were private U.S. citizens, or .3 percent. A private citizen is defined as ‘any U.S. citizen not acting in an official capacity on behalf of the U.S. government.’

Of the 13,288 people killed by terrorist attacks last year, seventeen were private U.S. citizens, or .1 percent.

The full article is available here

stART Turns Worcester's Green Street Into A Cultural Landscape - Steven H. Foskett Jr.

stART on the Street is central Massachusetts largest, art, music and performance festival.   

The past few years the spring stART festival has been held in the north Main Street area, but this year the Canal District people invited the group to set up in their neighborhood. A rain out last weekend didn't seem to have an impact on attendance on a warm Sunday under perfect skies.

With Green Street blocked off for the day, thousands of people roamed up and down. Families and couples tried on jewelry and munched on food from local restaurants, while various bands played. A belly dancer stopped festival-goers in their tracks, while an acoustic guitarist gently soothed the crowd above a lot on Gold Street. Puppeteers entertained little ones as they walked by, and a car show, new for this year, offered a small but eclectic display of everything from old Dodges and Pontiacs to a quirky old 1960s Saab 96. The venue was dog-friendly, stroller friendly, and even iguana friendly, as a man walked by holding the large lizard.

Stacy Lord, one of the festival's co-directors, said it seemed to be a good fit early in the afternoon.

“It has a whole flair to itself,” Ms. Lord said.

The full article is available here

Florida: You Cannot Take Our Vote - Lisa Sharon Harper

June 4 marked the 93rd anniversary of the congressional passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. On August 18, 1920 Tennessee became the 36th state to pass the Amendment and on that day women’s suffrage became the law of the land. 

Florida missed that boat. The sunshine state had never voted on the 19th Amendment before it was ratified. Florida’s legislature didn’t actually ratify the 19th Amendment until it took a symbolic vote in 1969.

The current news about Florida’s voter purge has me wondering what happened in the 43 years between Florida’s symbolic thumbs up for suffrage and today’s current voter suppression?

The answer: The year 2000 happened.

Katherine Harris was elected Florida’s Secretary of State in 1998. Soon after, she initiated a voter purge in Florida that had been unseen since the days of Jim Crow. More than 57,700 eligible voters were wrongfully purged from Florida’s voter rolls. Harris claimed the purge was an attempt to block convicted felons from voting, but the purge was conducted in such a way that the state gave itself wide latitude to strike names that were not confirmed felons.

Recently Florida launched a new voter suppression campaign that claims to target non-citizens, but disproportionately affects Latinos and relies on an unreliable list of 2700 potential citizens. 

In a democracy, the ability to vote is one of the most basic ways each citizen is given to exercise agency in her world.  No matter how poor you are, no matter how rich you are, no matter marginalized you are, no matter how much power you wield, no matter obscure your life, and no matter how famous your name - all have the right to exercise a most basic form of agency in our world—the cast of a vote.

So, as we celebrate the anniversary of the congressional passage of the 19th Amendment, I celebrate the Justice Department’s decision to block implementation of Florida’s latest ode to Jim Crow. And I thank the 67 county elections supervisors, 30 of whom are Republican, who have defied Gov. Rick Scott and refused to implement the Florida purge.

The full article is available here

Will Americans Speak Out Against Obama's Drone Warfare? - Medea Benjamin

On May 29, The New York Times published an extraordinarily in-depth look at the intimate role President Obama has played in authorizing US drone attacks overseas, particularly in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. It is chilling to read the cold, macabre ease with which the President and his staff decide who will live or die.

The fate of people living thousands of miles away is decided by a group of Americans, elected and unelected, who don’t speak their language, don’t know their culture, don’t understand their motives or values. While purporting to represent the world’s greatest democracy, US leaders are putting people on a hit list who are as young as 17, people who are given no chance to surrender, and certainly no chance to be tried in a court of law.

An article in the Washington Post today, entitled “Drone strikes spur backlash in Yemen,” shows that the damage is not just long term but immediate. After interviewing more than 20 tribal leaders, victims’ relatives, human rights activists and officials from southern Yemen, journalist Sudarsan Raghavan concluded that the escalating U.S. strikes are radicalizing the local population and stirring increasing sympathy for al-Qaeda-linked militants. “The drones are killing al-Qaeda leaders,” said legal coordinator of a local human rights group Mohammed al-Ahmadi, “but they are also turning them into heroes.”

Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer suing the CIA on behalf of drone victims, thinks its time for the American people to speak out. “Can you trust a program that has existed for eight years, picks its targets in secret, faces zero accountability and has killed almost 3,000 people in Pakistan alone whose identities are not known to their killers?,” he asks. “When women and children in Waziristan are killed with Hellfire missiles, Pakistanis believe this is what the American people want. I would like to ask Americans, ‘Do you?’”

The full article is available here

Paul Krugman: We Could End This Depression Right Now - Josh Holland

The central message of Noble Laureate Economist Paul Krugman's new book, End This Depression Now! is simple: It doesn't have to be like this. No external dynamic is keeping unemployment at more than 8 percent and consigning a generation of young workers to an economy in which risk is plentiful and opportunities scarce. It is only a failure of political will -- and an almost universal embrace of conservative voodoo economics – that is keeping us mired in this dark economic moment.

Of the 2009 stimulus, Krugman writes, “Those who had more or less the right ideas about what the economy needed, including President Obama, were timid, never willing either to acknowledge just how much action was required or to admit later on that what they did in the first round was inadequate.” Instead of treating the dismal jobs picture as a crisis requiring their full attention, Washington “pivoted” to talking about the deficit – a phantom menace -- at precisely the wrong time. “People with the wrong ideas,” Krugman writes, “were vehement and untroubled by self-doubt.”

The moral of the book is: this doesn’t have to be happening. This is essentially a technical process; it’s a small thing. It’s like having a dead battery in a car, and while there may be a lot wrong with the car, you can get the car going remarkably easily, if you’re willing to accept that’s what the problem really is.

First and foremost, what we have is an economy that just doesn’t have enough spending. Consumers are hobbled by debt, corporations don’t want to spend if they don’t see consumer demand. Somebody has to step in and spend, and that somebody is the government. The government could – and by all means let’s talk about forward-looking, big projects -- right away get a big boost in the economy just by reversing the big cutbacks that have taken place in state and local governments these past three years. Get the schoolteachers rehired and get the policemen and firefighters back on the beat. Fill those potholes that have been developing in New Jersey and I believe all over America. We’d then be most of the way back to a decent economy again.

The full article is available here

Paul Simon's Graceland, Apartheid and the 'Deep Truth that Artists Speak' - Cathleen Falsani

For many of us, Graceland — rightly or wrongly — planted seeds of the beauty and joyful strength of Africa in our imaginations for the first time.

25 years after the release of Paul Simon's Graceland album, the singer-songwriter returned to South Africa to visit the musicians who worked with him on what many believe is his musical masterpiece. A new documentary film, Under African Skies, chronicles Simon's journey and the role that music — and artists — may have played in bringing about the end of apartheid.

This was 1985. Nelson Mandela still was in prison (on year 22 of his sentence and more than five years away from his eventual release.) Apartheid struggles and extreme racial tensions in South Africa had reached a vicious zenith. And there also was a cultural boycott in place. Artists — no matter how famous or big-hearted they might be — were supposed to stay away from the country.

Joseph Shabalala, founder and leader of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the South African acapella group featured on the album that Simon introduced to the American audience via a now famous performance on Saturday Night Live well before Graceland ever hit record shops, calls Simon “brother.”

“He just come to me like a baby, like, ‘Father, can you teach me something?’ And we hug. That was my first time to hug … a white man,” Shabalala recalls in the film. “When we started working together, we didn’t see black or white… He’s my brother.”

Graceland won numerous awards, including a Grammy for record of the year, and has gone on to become one of the most enduring albums in American music. Musically it did things that hadn’t been done before in popular genres, mixing traditional African tunes, sounds and rhythms, sampling bits from disparate cultures.

But the celebrated album is much more than the sum of its parts. For many of us, Graceland — rightly or wrongly — planted seeds of the beauty and joyful strength of Africa in our imaginations for the first time, which led more than a few of us to dig deeper into issues of injustice there and raise our voices on behalf of our African brothers and sisters.

The full article is available here

Tenacious D: Rize Of The Fenix (B+) - AV Club

If 2006’s Tenacious D In 'The Pick Of Destiny' hadn’t bombed at the box office, Jack Black and Kyle Gass would’ve had to invent some other setback to rise (or rize) from on the new Rize Of The Fenix. Black acknowledges the failure of Destiny right in the album’s opening line, as well as the not-all-that-exaggerated assumption that the movie finished off Tenacious D for good.

But rather than dwell on Jack and Rage Kage’s bad fortune, Rize posits The Pick Of The Destiny as motivation for Tenacious D to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is still a good best rock ’n’ roll band. This puts Tenacious D on a furious quest that brings out its best on Rize.

Whereas Tenacious D was an arena-metal record, Rize Of The Fenix touches on a number of styles, including the Spanish guitar finger-picking of “Senorita,” the English folk of “The Ballad Of Hollywood Jack And The Rage Kage,” and the ’80s soundtrack pastiche “To Be The Best.” Rize still has plenty of heft—much of it courtesy of Dave Grohl, who plays drums on nearly every track—but Black and Gass have made an album that is surprisingly varied and even epic at times, particularly the title track, which moves through Iron Maiden dynamics to a gooey, power-pop chorus.

The full article is available here

Clean Energy As Culture War - David Roberts

On clean energy, the material/financial aspects of the conflict are the easiest to understand. Wind, solar, and the rest threaten the financial dominance and political influence of dirty energy. However, there also the cultural and psychological aspects of the conflict.

Conservative leaders are telling their flock that there are endless deposits of fossil fuels all around them, if only those pesky Democrats and their regulations would get out of the way. The message is that the American way of life can continue forever, indeed that it is our patriotic birthright, but that Democrats want to take it from them. That goes deeper than energy. It’s about home and hearth.

In terms of broad cultural associations and identities, the issue of energy is wrapped up in a way of life that they claim is under threat from multiple directions.  They’re saying that Democrats want to make America, the land of plenty, into Europe, the (imagined) land of tiny cars, cramped apartments, and high prices. Again, that’s about more than prices or watts. It’s about cultural identity.

This is in spite of the fact that the per-unit price of energy goes up, consumer bills can go down, through efficiency. It’s possible to use less energy while still enjoying the same high quality of life. There’s no other choice. Cheap, abundant fossil fuels are a thing of the past.

Reducing emissions enough to substantially slow climate change will inevitably involve being more judicious and intelligent in our energy use. Profligate, heedless consumption of disposable crap is going to have to be reined in. That will mean changing habits and land-use patterns. Insofar as those habits and land-use patterns are viewed as constitutive of a “way of life,” many will view that as a threat.

The full article is available here

Exonerees Served More than 10,000 Years in Prison for Crimes They Didn't Commit - Maurice Possley

Nearly a quarter of a century after DNA testing was used to prove that a defendant had been falsely convicted of a crime, the American public has become familiar with the phenomenon and how the script plays out in our courtrooms.

The exonerated defendant stands before a judge and is informed that the conviction is vacated and the charges are dismissed. And then the former inmate —more than 100 have come from Death Row — is joined by family members and lawyers in a celebration on the courthouse steps.

Yes, it is a joyous occasion to step from behind prison bars after years — as many as 30 years in one case —of being locked up for a crime that was not committed.

But, as a report issued Monday by the National Registry of Exonerations makes clear, behind every one of these jubilant moments are tragedies, some of them of enormous proportion.

The full article is available here

The Mecca of Metal - Worcester Palladium Proves Its Worth In Niche Market - Matt Robert

“If you’re into metal music anywhere in the world, you know about the Palladium,” says Chris Besaw of Break-Thru Music, a joint business venture of MassConcerts, which exclusively books the Palladium as well as a few dozen other venues throughout southern New England. “It’s definitely known internationally within that world of the metal and hardcore scene.”

Justin Thomas, 27, agrees. He, along with friend, Jason Gill, 32, drove 500 miles from southern Maryland to attend the event, renting a hotel room in Westboro for the weekend.

“We met people from Australia,” raves Scott McLennan, freelance journalist and former music editor with the Worcester Telegram.  “I remember one time I was hanging out [at the festival] and there was this band,” recalls McLennan, laughing. “I want to say it was [Polish blackened death metal band] Behemoth [who played NEMF in 2007] – and the guitar player walks into the Palladium and he’s like, ‘I can’t believe I’m here; I can’t believe I’m in the Palladium!’ And Mike Hsu [of WAAF] and I were like, ‘This shit hole?’ So, it was like hallowed ground, like ‘Metal Land.’”

“There’s definitely a huge economic runoff,” assures Besaw. “We’re bringing in probably, over the course of the weekend, in and out of the building, about 7,000 people. A lot of those people stayed in local hotels. I know some of those hotels were sold out. We allow re-entry during the day. So, these kids were all out in the streets, going to local restaurants, going to local stores across the street. Everybody who’s in the area is benefitting from us bringing these people to the city.”

The full article is available here

Tea Partiers Who Opposed Bank Bailout Take Campaign Donations From Bailed-Out Banks - Travis Waldron

Tea Party-backed candidates swept into Washington in 2010 on a wave of opposition to bank bailouts. Now that they’re in Washington, however, their campaigns are drowning in campaign cash provided by the very banks that benefited from the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

The 10 freshmen Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee who have Tea Party backing have taken more than $100,000 from the political action committees affiliated with JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs — the nation’s five largest banks.

The Tea Party hasn’t succeeded in ending “too big too fail” because they haven’t tried. Though the five biggest banks are now bigger than they were before the financial crisis, the Tea Party members haven’t proposed a single piece of legislation to limit their size. Instead, they’ve focused on repealing financial reform and blocking efforts to protect consumers from Wall Street’s predatory practices.

The full article is available here

Corporations Spending The Most On Lobbying See Their Tax Rates Drop - Rebecca Leber

Two-thirds of the largest 200 U.S. corporations lobbied on at least one tax bill between 2007 and 2010, and here’s why: the majority of them ended up paying lower taxes in 2010.

The eight major corporations that spent the most on lobbying, for a total $540 million, all saw their tax rates decrease. According to a Sunlight Foundation report, the odds that those companies saw lower rates merely by chance is less than 1 in 100. The odds that six of those corporations paid seven percentage points less is even lower, at only 1 in 100,000.

Instead, the reduction was likely a result of their presence in Washington, lobbying for tax giveaways.

The full article is available here

The "Voter Fraud" Fraud - Ari Berman

Between 2000 and 2007, there were 32,299 UFO sightings in the United States, 352 deaths caused by lightning, but only nine cases of voter impersonation, according to a great new infographic by Craiglist founder Craig Newmark.

Yet conservatives continue to hype the extremely rare occurrence of election fraud as if it were a widespread problem and is somehow responsible for the election of Obama. And there is evidence that they’ve been successful in pushing this fact-free narrative among the broader public.

In 2009, Peter Dreier and Christopher Martin of Occidental College studied the media coverage of ACORN during the 2008 election and concluded:

• 82.8% of the stories failed to mention that actual voter fraud is very rare
• 80.3% of the stories failed to mention that ACORN was reporting registration irregularities to authorities, as required by law
• 85.1% of the stories about ACORN failed to note that ACORN was acting to stop incidents of registration problems by its (mostly temporary) employees when it became aware of these problems
• 95.8% of the stories failed to provide deeper context, especially efforts by Republican Party officials to use allegations of "voter fraud" to dampen voting by low‐income and minority Americans, including the firing of U.S. Attorneys who refused to cooperate with the politicization of voter-fraud accusations—firings that ultimately led to the resignation of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales

The real story in 2012 is how the myth of voter fraud has been advanced by Republicans to justify new voting restrictions in more than a dozen states, which could disenfranchise up to 5 million voters on Election Day, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. That’s a whole lot of casualties in response to a few bad actors.

The full article is available here

When Politicians Hit Wrong Notes - Dave Whitaker

The GOP isn’t unique in the art of foot-in-mouth disease, but 2012 is proving a banner year for the party with the pachyderm mascot to wade knee-deep in elephant dung. The Republicans just can’t stop picking campaign songs without first securing the rights.

Candidates are supposed to get permission from ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) to use copyrighted music in any kind of public performance. However, the Grand Old Party seems to have developed a Grand Old Tradition of failing to do so – or at least, failing make sure the act they’re playing is actually on board with the politician.

This classic stumble can be traced back to 1984. When President Ronald Reagan was running for re-election, he cited Bruce Springsteen as representative of the American dream. What he failed to realize is that “Born in the U.S.A.”, Springsteen’s hit at the time, was not a flag-waving anthem but a seething attack on the poor treatment received by Vietnam veterans when they came home. Oops.

I don’t deny there are ample bone-headed errors from both sides of the political fence. When it comes to politicians associating themselves with music, though, the Republican party has a runaway lead on hitting sour notes.

The full article is available here

A New Green Agenda for Commuters - The Nation

The huge difference between the thinking of Republicans and Democrats disappears when it comes to gas prices. Both subscribe to the same dubious premise: we can lower prices by increasing supply. But over the past decade, such policies have had little effect on the global oil market.

It’s time to change our approach: rather than trying to increase supply in a vain attempt to cut prices, progressives should be embracing policies that will reduce the amount of gasoline we use, thus reducing the impact of prices on household budgets and the national economy.

Progressives should establish a new green agenda that takes the dialogue away from the empty promises of Republicans, who persist in the fantasy that more drilling will bring lower prices. We have much to gain if we make energy (and by extension the environment) a tangible pocketbook issue for the middle class. Instead of talking about abstractions like green jobs and green energy, candidates have to focus on greener rides—and greener wallets.

Three big policy initiatives could put families back in control of their money and their lives: a loan guarantee program for efficient cars, a set of incentives that involve employers in worker transit, and a reorientation of highway and transit funding to encourage innovation and choice in transit. As I’ll discuss below, these strategies—while markedly different from most of the green proposals under discussion—deliver large environmental, economic and political benefits quickly, while building a platform for deeper cuts in carbon emissions and larger markets for green services in the future.

The full article is available here

Ryan Budget is Robin Hood in Reverse, On Steroids - Bob Greenstein

House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan's budget is a remarkable document — one that, for most of the past  half-century, would have been outside the bounds of mainstream discussion due to its extreme nature. In essence, this budget is Robin Hood in reverse — on steroids.  It would likely produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history and likely increase poverty and inequality more than any other budget in recent times (and possibly in the nation’s history).

Specifically, the Ryan budget would impose extraordinary cuts in programs that serve as a lifeline for our nation’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens, and over time would cause tens of millions of Americans to lose their health insurance or become underinsured. It would also impose severe cuts in non-defense discretionary programs—much deeper than the across-the-board cuts ("sequestration") that are scheduled to take place starting in January — thereby putting core government functions at still greater risk.

Yet alongside these extraordinary budget cuts, with their dismantling of key parts of the safety net, the budget features stunning new tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

The full article is available here

Gas Price Rhetoric Pumps Up The Hype - Bob King

The debate about rising gasoline prices is generating a lot of fuzzy math. Hence the cloud of murky, misleading or downright inaccurate rhetoric flying around.  Here’s POLITICO’s guide to some of the season’s most bewildering rhetoric:

1) Oil and gasoline prices are the highest they’ve been since 1918. Or the past 150 years:
The reality: Gasoline prices are still below the peaks they reached under Bush in June 2008, when the inflation-adjusted monthly average price for a gallon of regular gasoline hit $4.26, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And even at $107 a barrel, crude oil is still well below that summer’s high price of $145 a barrel.

2) Gasoline prices have doubled under Obama:
This statement is true, though it’s incomplete — which hasn’t stopped it from becoming part of the standard GOP stump speech on energy policy.  The pre-Obama era was no low-gas-price utopia either, and prices more than doubled under Bush before the financial crash. The summer 2008 peak was 127 percent higher than the inflation-adjusted price of $1.88 a gallon when Bush was inaugurated.

3) U.S. oil and gas production is way down under Obama. Or way up:
Here, the two parties sound like they live in separate universes.  On federal lands and federal offshore waters, oil production fell sharply last year, partly because of the after-effects of the BP spill — but was still 12 percent higher than before Obama became president.

Natural gas production, meanwhile has soared to the highest levels ever, mainly because of the industry’s success in extracting previously unimagined quantities from shale reserves on private and state-owned lands.

The production numbers, drops in fuel demand and improvements in energy efficiency have caused U.S. reliance on petroleum imports to shrink to their lowest levels since the late 1990s

4) Watergate-gate:
D.C.-area residents are familiar with the insanely high prices of the Exxon station at the Watergate complex, which routinely charges as much as $1 a gallon more than other stations less than a mile away — including a Sunoco across the street. So that makes it a magnet for news organizations or other groups shopping for a shocking price, especially one within walking distance of the White House.

The full article is available here

Conservative Christianity and Its Discontents - Religion Dispatches

Anti-intellectualism is deeply rooted in American evangelicalism, reaching into the classrooms of popular schools, like Cedarville University and Liberty University. Millions of evangelical youth grow up hearing that there is a real debate when it comes to human origins, that homosexuality is a sinful lifestyle choice, and that secular historians are suppressing the vision of the Founding Fathers that America was supposed to be a Christian nation.

Controversies that should have died decades and even centuries ago are kept alive by organizations invested in the answers of yesteryear, often because those old answers, say stalwarts, came from the Bible and are believed to have been laid down by God. These answers informed the thinking of a long-gone society that, through the rose-tinted glasses of those nostalgic for a better time, looks moral, family-oriented, and respectful of God’s laws in ways that the present age is not.

Many evangelicals, skeptical that a PhD after a name gives any reasonable authority, have come to sympathize with and even celebrate Fox News’ and its most well-known anti-intellectual, Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly, who pits his understanding against that of experts in their fields of study, is fond of scoffing, “sorry, professor, not buying it,” suggesting that expertise is really just opinion.

There are many academic historians, geneticists, psychologists, and other intellectuals within the Christian tradition who do not deny the knowledge claims of their respective fields. Such believers, however, are viewed with suspicion if they do not speak the language of biblical inerrancy, anti-evolution, and conservative politics embraced by other Christians.  The intellectual trajectory of American evangelicalism is not encouraging.

The full article is available here

Lessons To Be Learned From Greece - Nicholas Kristof

In the United States, Republicans lambaste President Obama's stimulus package as a failure and insist on bone-crunching budget-cutting. If you want to know how well that works, come visit Europe — especially Greece.

Yes, Greece needed a wake-up whack and economic reform, but Republican-style austerity knocked the patient unconscious. Contrast the still-shrinking economies of Europe with the stirrings of recovery in the United States, and you feel lucky to be an American and a beneficiary of President Obama's stimulus.

No doubt Greece had been living recklessly and needed structural reforms. While much of Europe was fundamentally healthy until the crisis hit, Greece truly was a mess. But the problem was not a welfare state — Greece has much less of a safety net than northern Europe. Rather, it was corruption, inefficiency and a system in which laws are optional.

Yet instead of structural reforms or improved tax collection, what has changed in Greece, so far, has mostly been slashed budgets. And austerity in the middle of recession has made matters worse — just as John Maynard Keynes predicted.

One of the earliest recorded economic crises in the Western world came in Athens in the fifth century B.C. Fortunately, Athens was then led by the great Pericles, an early Keynesian who did not respond by slashing budgets.

Instead, he ordered a public-works initiative and built the Parthenon.

The full article is available here

Walmart is no savior: More small businesses = healthier people - Tom Laskway

Reforming our food system is a Herculean task; one that might intimidate Hercules himself.  Of the 40,000 food items in a typical U.S. grocery store, more than half are now brought to us by just 10 corporations.  And one in four food dollars is spent at Walmart.

A new report from Food and Water Watch argues that, not only is Walmart’s dominance problematic in general, but the company’s recent projection of itself as a food system savior is misleading.

Walmart’s model is based on practices that drive consolidation; take money away from farmers, workers, and processors; and drive agriculture to get more industrialized. Walmart’s model is part of the problem, which means the company is not going to be a meaningful part of the solution to shortcomings in the modern-day food supply.

A recent study published in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society suggests that communities that invite Walmart in may be making a devil’s bargain. The study found strong evidence that communities that rely on big box retailers — and large corporate employers in general — are less healthy and have higher rates of obesity and diabetes than those that don’t.

The researchers found that, despite the advantages that employees of large companies have in income and benefits, communities as a whole who relied on small businesses were more healthy otherwise. As they put it, “The concentration of small businesses is associated with lower rates of mortality, obesity and diabetes.”

The full article is available here

Challenging the Self-Made Myth - Katrina vanden Heuvel

Over the last thirty years, anti-government arguments by conservative pundits and politicians have gained prominence, and the rhetoric this 2012 campaign season seems more toxic than ever.  Republicans are relentlessly pushing the notion that lower taxes, less regulation and small government (except for Defense) will magically end the recession, create a better country, and “job creators” will lift all boats.

It’s BS. As Congressman Barney Frank recently said, “I’ve never seen a tax cut put out a fire. I’ve never seen a tax cut build a bridge.”  Americans benefit every day from government—from consumer protection to roads and bridges to food and safety regulation.

A central myth that underlies today’s anti-government rhetoric: that an individual’s success is the result of gumption and hard work alone.  In reality, personal success is closely tied to the supports society provides.  In fact, the greater an individual’s success, the greater his or her dependence on public infrastructure, public investment in research and innovation, and regulations and fair rules.

No one has honed in on the need to reset the narrative on government more effectively than Elizabeth Warren who laid out her cogent argument simply and powerfully in a gritty video clip that went viral: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. You built a factory? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

The full article is available here

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

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

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

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

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

The full article is available here

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

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

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

The full article is available here

What Bible is Santorum Reading? -- Mike Lux

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

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

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

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

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

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

The full article is available here

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

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

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

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

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

The full article is available here

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

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

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

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

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

The full article is available here

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

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

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

Read the related article here

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

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

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

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

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

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

The full article is available here