September 19, 2011
August 04, 2011
We are on the Cusp of Losing our Democracy; Demonstrate the True Will of the People
Now is the time to come to the aid of your country! Our democracy is being bought by the highest bidder. Only an American Spring can take it back!
With Al Gore and Keith Olbermann calling for the same thing that we are calling for, the time is upon us.
We are recruiting volunteers to help organize a march in Washington and local satellite rallies all across America. Please use the online form below to sign up. We are going to have a conference call for our local volunteers on Saturday at 3pm ET. We'll send you details by email.
We plan to announce the date on Sunday.
CALL TO ACTION: If you do not consent to being governed by corporations or billionaires...If you want to be heard by your government..If you're ready to stand up for America's democracy and your dignity as citizens...Join us. Let's build America's Tahrir Square.
We are calling for is a peaceful and decisive demonstration to restore democracy in America. We want to see a million Americans turn up for a march in Washington with satellite rallies in every town and city.
As many acknowledge, we are on the cusp of losing our democracy. As everyday Americans, we just don't feel heard by our government or mainstream media. Representation has broken down.
July 27, 2011
Shut up, obey, and collaborate
The fall of a great country is upon us. And who would think that Obama would help us get there. Incredibly, it was his admiration of Lincoln that brings us to the precipice. Compromise, the basis of our legislative process, has brought the great Democratic Party to a Faustian bargain with the Tea Party. Read this whole article. Not surprisingly, its from a non-western source, the center of what's left of the international free press, Qatar's Aljazeera.
The irony is that the West brought us empire on a global scale and drew its cultural, economic, and political strength from interconnections with all parts of the world. The cosmopolis of New York, London and Paris - a "brown" not a "white" West - are more appropriate beacons of a West flush with power and confidence in its values than the imaginary purification achieved through concentration camps and closed borders.But just what might be corroding values in the West?Image via Wikipedia
This was one of the questions that animated the Frankfurt School and those who influenced it. They focused on the interaction between capitalism and culture. They noted the ways in which capitalism progressively turned everything into something that could be bought or sold, measuring value only by the bottom line. Slowly but surely such measures came to apply to the cultural values at the core of society. Even time, as Benjamin Franklin told us, is money, a doctrine which horrified Max Weber in his searing indictment of the capitalist mentality as an "iron cage" without "spirit".
Note for example the ways in which the great professional vocations of the West - lawyers, journalists, academics, doctors - have been co-opted and corrupted by bottom line thinking. Money and "efficiency" are the values by which we stand, not law, truth or health. Students are imagined as "customers", citizens as "stakeholders". Professional associations worry about the risk to their bottom line rather than furthering the values they exist to represent. Graduates of elite Western universities, imbued with the learning of our great thinkers, are sent off to corporations like News International. There they learn to shut up, obey, and collaborate in the dark work of exploitation for profit, for which they will be well rewarded, at least financially speaking.
Thanks in part to the grip of corporate power on the media and on political parties, few today in the West can imagine any other politics than those of big money. In the US, and increasingly even in Europe, the income differential between the poor and the wealthy already resembles that of banana republics. The downtrodden are asked to bear the burden of a financial crisis created by bankers. America's wealthy fly their children to summer camp in tax-free private jets amid a real rate of unemployment of over fifteen per cent.
Neoliberalism has only accelerated these processes at the heart of capitalist society. Here is a far more convincing threat to Western values and "social cohesion" than the lunatic fears of fascists. Notably, this is a threat that emanates from within, not without. It is precisely social democratic parties like Norway's Labour Party - Breivik's target - which have sought to contain the corrosive effects of capitalism and ensure the survival of the West's most humane values.
June 30, 2011
Starve the Beast Redux
The scary part of Starve the Beast conspiracy threatens now the stability of the economy of the whole western world. Protests about the on-going class warfare on the poor and yes even the middle class have been routine for years. Riots have broken out in Greece and will likely soon come to Spain. Its not inconceivable that we'll see similar riots in Britain and even the US.People are tired, hungry and too many are unemployed and homeless. The 40 hour week has all but disappeared in the non-union work place in a blizzard of salaried and contract positions. It's only a matter of time before something more serious happens. The results of more serious consequences could be catastrophic.
Paul Krugman / Starve the beast: Fiscal calamity is the GOP's plan to shrink government
Starving the beasts is the Republican conspiracy to bankrupt the US government to force downsizing government as well as shrinking the middle class in the interest of lower wages until the US can compete against China and India in manufacturing. Paul claims he said it first, but no, I've been talking about it since 2004. Ronald Reagan sold it to the country during the John Anderson debate. A staffer is credited with coining the term. Grover Norquist convinced Double Think Dubya to implement the strategy big time (Wikipedia)
OK, the beast is starving. Now what? That's the question confronting Republicans. But they're refusing to answer, or even to engage in any serious discussion about what to do.
For readers who don't know what I'm talking about: Ever since Ronald Reagan, the GOP has been run by people who want a much smaller government. In the famous words of the activist Grover Norquist, conservatives want to get the government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
But there has always been a political problem with this agenda. Voters may say that they oppose big government, but the programs that actually dominate federal spending -- Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security -- are very popular. So how can the public be persuaded to accept large spending cuts?
The conservative answer, which evolved in the late 1970s, would be dubbed "starving the beast" during the Reagan years. The idea -- propounded by many members of the conservative intelligentsia, from Alan Greenspan to Irving Kristol -- was basically that sympathetic politicians should engage in a game of bait-and-switch. Rather than proposing unpopular spending cuts, Republicans would push through popular tax cuts, with the deliberate intention of worsening the government's fiscal position. Spending cuts could then be sold as a necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate an unsustainable budget deficit.
And the deficit came. True, more than half of this year's budget deficit is the result of the Great Recession, which has both depressed revenues and required a temporary surge in spending to contain the damage. But even when the crisis is over, the budget will remain deeply in the red, largely as a result of George W. Bush-era tax cuts and unfunded wars. In addition, the combination of an aging population and rising medical costs will, unless something is done, lead to explosive debt growth after 2020.
So the beast is starving, as planned. It should be time, then, for conservatives to explain which parts of the beast they want to cut. And President Barack Obama has, in effect, invited them to do just that, by calling for a bipartisan deficit commission.
Many progressives were deeply worried by this proposal, fearing that it would turn into a kind of Trojan horse -- in particular, that the commission would end up reviving the long-standing Republican goal of gutting Social Security. But they needn't have worried: Senate Republicans overwhelmingly voted against legislation that would have created a commission with actual power, and it is unlikely that anything meaningful will come from the much weaker commission Mr. Obama established by executive order.
Why are Republicans reluctant to sit down and talk? Because they would then be forced to put up or shut up. Since they're adamantly opposed to reducing the deficit with tax increases, they would have to explain what spending they want to cut. And guess what? After three decades of preparing the ground for this moment, they're still not willing to do that.
In fact, conservatives have backed away from spending cuts they themselves proposed in the past. In the 1990s, for example, Republicans in Congress tried to force through sharp cuts in Medicare. But now they have made opposition to any effort to spend Medicare funds more wisely the core of their campaign against health care reform (death panels!). And presidential hopefuls say things like this, from Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota: "I don't think anybody's gonna go back now and say, 'Let's abolish, or reduce, Medicare and Medicaid.' "
What about Social Security? Five years ago the Bush administration proposed limiting future payments to upper- and middle-income workers, in effect means-testing retirement benefits. But in December, The Wall Street Journal's editorial page denounced any such means-testing, because "middle- and upper-middle-class (i.e., GOP) voters would get less than they were promised in return for a lifetime of payroll taxes." (Hmm. Since when do conservatives openly admit that the GOP is the party of the affluent?)
At this point, then, Republicans insist that the deficit must be eliminated but they're not willing either to raise taxes or to support cuts in any major government programs. And they're not willing to participate in serious bipartisan discussions, either, because that might force them to explain their plan -- and there isn't any plan, except to regain power.
But there is a kind of logic to the current Republican position: In effect, the party is doubling down on starve-the-beast. Depriving the government of revenue, it turns out, wasn't enough to push politicians into dismantling the welfare state. So now the de facto strategy is to oppose any responsible action until we are in the midst of a fiscal catastrophe. You read it here first.
June 14, 2011
The Truth About the Economy
Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, breaks down how the economy went from great to horrific in six simple steps.
June 08, 2011
Contrary to Popular Belief: Inflation Hurts the Rich, Benefit the Debtor Middle Class, Retirees? Not So Much
Paul Krugman, as usual, has it right.
Image via Wikipedia... who stands to gain from deflation, and lose if inflation is, say, 4 percent over a period of 10 years? Is it little old ladies living on fixed incomes, and salt of the earth workers who have scrimped and saved?
Well, no. There are, of course, some ordinary people who would lose a bit from higher inflation. But Social Security — the bedrock of retirement for most Americans — is indexed to inflation, and retirement accounts invested in stocks wouldn’t be hurt.
... Since I’ve been arguing that some inflation would help the economy recover, what we’re seeing in practice is that defending the interests of a small wealthy slice of the population takes priority over a possible recovery strategy.
May 26, 2011
Nobel Laurieate Krugman: The Debt Is Not a Crisis, Risk of Depression IS
Last year Paul Krugman warned that we seemed to be heading into the “Third Depression” — by which, he explains, he meant we were in a prolonged period of economic weakness. The signs are all around us that the "recovery" is a jobless one. The rate of growth in jobs will take years to hire back all who have been laid off. In fact, federal and state workers and teachers are now facing lay off in the next fiscal year.
Do we really want to face a "lost decade"? Or are we willing to stimulate the economy before this gets any worse?
Debt Arithmetic
The whole tone of current discussion about deficits is one of urgency: deficits must be brought down now now now or crisis looms. Where is this coming from? Not from the arithmetic.
The way the story is often told, deficits mean higher debt, which means higher interest payments, which can mean a spiral into bankruptcy. And qualitatively that’s not wrong. If you put numbers to it, however, for countries that are not facing huge risk premia, the spiral is very, very slow.
Here’s a sample calculation.
The latest IMF Fiscal Monitor predicts that general government in the US — that’s federal, state and local combined — will run a deficit of 7.5 percent of GDP next year, and that net debt will be 75 percent of GDP.
So how fast would the debt spiral be going?
You need to bear in mind that growth and inflation limit the rate of rise in the debt ratio. Suppose that we have 4 percent nominal GDP growth, which is actually low by historical standards. This shaves 3 percentage points off the rise in the debt/GDP ratio. So a year later, given those numbers, debt rises by 4.5 percentage points of GDP.
What’s the interest burden of that rise? At minimum we should correct for inflation, so use the TIPS yield. That’s currently below 1, but let’s be pessimistic and call it 2. Even so, the added interest burden is less than one-tenth of one percent of GDP.
So even with substantial deficits, the pace of long-term budget worsening is very slow. If it’s a debt death spiral, it’s a slooooowww motion death spiral.
But, say the critics, psychology can change suddenly, sharply raising those interest costs. The question then is why psychology should change. Investors can do the same arithmetic I’ve just done; why should they panic over a small rise in the interest burden?
Now, investors might well panic over signs of political deadlock — but that could happen regardless of the current year’s deficit.
Still, Serious People tell us that investors will turn on us unless we slash the deficit immediately — and they know this because, well, um …
As I’ve often written, we’re in a strange state now where people who actually take textbook economics and simple arithmetic seriously are seen as dangerously radical and irresponsible, while people who believe in invisible bond vigilantes and confidence fairies, who claim to know what the market will want even though there’s no sign of that desire in current asset prices, are viewed as Very Serious.
Anyway, the arithmetic of debt is much less scary than you might think.
May 25, 2011
The Worldwide Climate Manipulation of Big Oil
Here is the best kept world secret, the one many people see, but few talk about. Here is the real reason there is a big oil disinformation campaign to discredit global warming. Big oil and many other reasource behemoths see billions in profits. We are all of us a part of the biggest and most dangerous experiment in climate manipulation in history. The poor of the world stand to lose the most, many will pay with their lives. Is the US already paying with intense storminess?
As declining sea ice and better mapping and technology make the Arctic more accessible, nations with interests there — including the United States — are beginning to stake their claims on the resource-rich region.
Russia planted a flag on the seafloor below the North Pole in 2007. Denmark announced this week that it would ask the United Nations to recognize the North Pole as an extension of Greenland, its territory. The U.S. sent a secretary of state to a meeting of eight Arctic nations earlier this month for the first time, a sign that Americans also have their eye on the region's potential resources.
"This region matters greatly to us," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said after the conference in Nuuk, Greenland.
The U.S. is committed to the Arctic Council's mission as well as the challenges the Arctic faces, Clinton said, including possible resource development.
Although numerous logistical challenges to oil and gas exploration in the region remain, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that as much of a third of the world's undiscovered gas and 13 percent of its undiscovered oil may be in the offshore Arctic, in relatively shallow water.
Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/05/24/114695/as-ice-melts-and-technology-improves.html#ixzz1NNPng9xJ
May 16, 2011
May 15, Nakba Day: The Truth About Palestine
Not surprisingly, there is very little truth being told about Palestinians on this day. Juan Cole is an exception.
In 1948, European Jewish settlers in British Mandate Palestine ethnically cleansed some 700,000 Palestinians, depriving them of the country promised them by the League of Nations in 1920 when it recognized Palestine as a Class A Mandate and charged Britain with bringing the new country into existence. (Syria and Iraq were also Class A Mandates, i.e. former Ottoman and Hapsburg territories now thought candidates for independent nationhood). Instead, Israel came into existence, born in a revolt against the British and a civil war with the Palestinians who formed over two-thirds of the population of Palestine.. Palestinians who had lived in what became Israel were forced by the Zionist military north to Lebanon, east to the West Bank, Syria and Jordan, and south into the Gaza Strip and Egypt. Most of those expelled from their homes were civilian non-combatants and some had informal peace agreements with inhabitants of neighboring Jewish settlements. There are now some 12 million Palestinians, given natural increase. About 1.5 million live in Israel and have a precarious citizenship, being only 20% of the population of an avowedly Jewish state. There are about 3.6 million in Jordan who have citizenship and another 140,000 or so (mainly from Gaza) who do not. The some 400,000 in Lebanon do not have citizenship, nor do the 450,000 in Syria. There are about 4 million in Gaza and the West Bank under Israeli military occupation who lack citizenship in a state.Image via Wikipedia
Palestinians thus became a scattered, largely refugee people, lacking a state that would guarantee them basic rights and human dignity. In Lebanon, where I have done interviewing with them, they cannot own property, mostly cannot work, cannot get permission to travel to Syria or Jordan.
May 11, 2011
Secret Pakistani Deal with US on Bin Laden
Image by Getty Images via @daylifeDid I miss this on network news? Or has the MSM just become a GOP propaganda machine?
It turns out that when President Obama ordered the Navy SEALs to get Usama Bin Laden in Abbotabad, he did not infringe against Pakistani sovereignty after all. Rather, he was acting in accordance with a longstanding secret agreement between Washington and Islamabad, according to The Guardian. The agreement even stipulated that the Pakistani government would be constrained by public opinion to condemn the US action in the aftermath, however insincere the rebuke might be.
Those who are unnecessarily worrying that Obama’s raid was lawless or set a precedent can rest easy; the only precedent is not military, but rather for back-room deals among governments who then put on public Kabuki plays. More.
April 27, 2011
Corporate Welfare Royalty
Thanks to Bernie Sanders, the word is getting out about corporate welfare. Thanks to Juan Cole for the heads up.
April 12, 2011
Wisconsin is not Broke, “Budget Crisis” a Fraud
As it always is, "crises" are created by Republican leadership to justify "sacrifice" that undermines the middle class and enriches the super rich. Republicans then have unlimited funds to run in elections and create propaganda machines to start all over again.
Image via Wikipedia
Wisconsin was not and is not “broke.” Its pension system gets a “gold star” for soundness, and it has no enduring structural shortfall in revenues. Gov. Scott Walker gave business a $500 million tax break and caused the budget deficit thereby, and then claimed that social spending had to be slashed and public unions destroyed because the state is “broke.”
Cutting taxes on the rich does not create “jobs,” as the first 8 years of the 21st century conclusively demonstrated. It throws more money to the rich, who use it to buy legislators to induce more tax cuts on the super-rich, so that over the past 20 years the rich have amassed four times as much wealth as they had before, while the average wage of the average worker in real terms is virtually where it was in 1970. Cutting taxes on the rich is a way of taxing the middle class and imposing extra burdens on working families.
April 11, 2011
A nation that destroys its systems of education becomes deaf, dumb and blind
We are witnessing the decline of the US into a second rate nation.
A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.
The Arab People Arise for Freedom, While US Sleeps While Freedom is Curtailed
Juan Cole catches the irony of our times. While US history still inspires the aspirations for freedom world wide, Americans seem content to watch TV while their freedoms and futures are stolen from them.
Image via WikipediaOn Friday, the US Congress endeavored to decide whether American democracy has irretrievably broken down because the representatives of the Billionaires refused to compromise with the representatives of the People (“cutting spending” while “cutting taxes” means “shifting the cost of running society to the middle class from the filthy rich”). The answer was that it had not, as long as the representatives of the People showed sufficient deference to the Billionaires, shuffling, keeping their eyes down, and obediently emptying their pockets. The middle class, successfully distracted by racial and religious hatreds and by attempts to impose patriarchal fundamentalism, was wreathed in vapid smiles as the billionaires sent movers to their homes to pick up the belongings they had just fleeced from them via their enforcers, the tea baggers.
As Americans rushed to surrender their constitutional rights, the peoples of the Middle East rose up from Libya to Iraq to demand those very rights for themselves– freedom of speech, religion, the press, and assembly, as well as safeguards against a secret police state that engages in routine unreasonable search and seizure and imposes cruel and unusual punishments while keeping prisoners hidden, denied habeas corpus, and often denied a speedy civil trial or even a trial at all.
March 08, 2011
It’s Official: Tunisia Now Freer than the U.S.
I don't know about you, but I really appreciate this old Madisonian, Juan Cole:
Arguably, Tunisians are now freer than Americans. The US government thinks our private emails are actually public. The FBI and NSA routinely read our email and they and other branches of the US government issue security letters in the place of warrants allowing them to tap phones and monitor whom we call, and even to call up our library records and conduct searches of our homes without telling us about it. Millions of telephone records were turned over to George W. Bush by our weaselly telecom companies. Courts allow government agents to sneak onto our property and put GPS tracking devices under our automobiles without so much as a warrant or even probable cause. Mr. Obama thinks this way of proceeding is a dandy idea.
The Fourth Amendment is on the verge of vanishing, and this attack on the Constitution is being abetted by pusillanimous and corrupt judges and fascistic elements in our national security apparatus. Freedom of peaceable assembly is also being whittled away in the United States of America via devices such as ‘free speech zones;’ the founding generation intended that the whole of the United States be a free speech zone. Many of the protests in the Middle East being cheered on by Americans would be illegal in this country.
Few among the public even seem to care about these assaults on our liberties here. At least the youth of the Middle East can generate a little passion over censorship and unreasonable surveillance. Makes an old Madisonian tear up a little.
Democrats Call for Probe Into Chamber's Shady Plot to Sabotage Progressive Organizations
Apparently the US Chamber of Commerce is adopting Carl Rove methods.
Washington Post's Dan Eggen reports that "more than a dozen" Democrats in the U.S. House are now calling on "Republican leaders" to open an investigation into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce plot which had been set to target the right-wing lobbying firms' perceived political enemies (which turned out to include me and my family at the top of their list, as reported in detail previously) with a proposed $12 million smear, forgery, fraud, and disinformation campaign.
While the Democrats' letter calling for a Congressional probe will not be released until Tuesday [Update: The full text of the letter is now posted at the end of this article], Eggen's reportage makes it clear that their concerns focus on the same disturbing point we highlighted in one of our first detailed reports on this matter. Namely, that the Chamber's law firm Hunton & Williams was organizing the plot with three government-contracted cyber-security/intelligence firms that had planned to turn tools developed for the "War on Terror" against U.S. citizens, journalists, and progressive organizations.
....A letter to Attorney General Eric Holder at the Department of Justice, demanding a special prosecutor be assigned to this case would be equally, if not more appropriate. Unfortunately, the DoJ is also compromised in this affair, having been the ones, incredibly enough, to refer the Chamber's law firm Hunton & Williams to the Bank of America for a parallel plot with the same three private security firms, in order to target WikiLeaks with a focus on discrediting their perceived supporters such as Salon journalist Glenn Greenwald. Given the DoJ's dubious involvement here, it seems similarly unlikely that they would take up such an investigation themselves either, but a letter calling for same from Congressional members might help.
March 07, 2011
March 06, 2011
The Smug Wealthy Have Gone Too Far -- And We're Finally Fighting Back
Michael Moore came to Madison WI to give a speech, perhaps marking a change in political history in American. The public employees of WI have stood up to the GOP and may have reinvigorated a union movement on the ropes. Now, the polls suggest that it's Governor Walker on the ropes.
By trying to destroy us corporate America has given birth to a movement -- a movement that is becoming a massive, nonviolent revolt across the country.
Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you'll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.
Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.
Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer "bailout" of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can't bring yourself to call that a financial coup d'état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.
March 04, 2011
Voters Rejecting House Republican Continuing Resolution in First Two Weeks
Over the past two weeks it’s clear that American families have seen the wrong spending priorities in the Republican Continuing Resolution. Instead of cutting taxpayer subsidies for Big Oil companies, House Republicans slashed K-12 education, public safety and security, investments in research and even assistance for homeless veterans.
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