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thinkahol *

Why Obama Isn't Fighting the Budget Battle - 0 views

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    In the next week the action moves from Wisconsin to Washington, where the deadline looms for a possible government shutdown over the federal budget. President Obama has to take a more direct and personal role in that budget battle - both for the economy's sake and for the sake of his re-election. But will he? Don't count on it. Worried congressional Democrats say the President needs to use his bully pulpit to counter defections in Democatic ranks, such as the ten Democrats and one allied Independent who on Wednesday voted against a Senate leadership plan to cut $6.2 billion from the federal budget over the rest of fiscal year 2011. They want Obama to grab the initiative and push a plan to eliminate tax breaks for oil companies and for companies that move manufacturing facilities out of the country, and a proposal for a surtax on millionaires. Most importantly, they're worried the President's absence from the debate will result in Republicans winning large budget cuts for the remainder of the fiscal year - large enough to imperil the fragile recovery. But Obama won't actively fight the budget battle if the current White House view of how he wins in 2012 continues to prevail. Shortly after the Democrats' "shellacking" last November, I phoned a friend in the White House who had served in the Clinton administration. "It's 1994 all over again," he said. "Now we move to the center."
thinkahol *

When Change Is Not Enough: The Seven Steps To Revolution | OurFuture.org - 0 views

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    "Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."- John F. KennedyThere's one thing for sure: 2008 isn't anything like politics as usual.The corporate media (with their unerring eye for the obvious point) is fixated on the narrative that, for the first time ever, Americans will likely end this year with either a woman or a black man headed for the White House. Bloggers are telling stories from the front lines of primaries and caucuses that look like something from the early 60s - people lining up before dawn to vote in Manoa, Hawaii yesterday; a thousand black college students in Prairie View, Texas marching 10 miles to cast their early votes in the face of a county that tried to disenfranchise them. In recent months, we've also been gobstopped by the sheer passion of the insurgent campaigns of both Barack Obama and Ron Paul, both of whom brought millions of new voters into the conversation - and with them, a sharp critique of the status quo and a new energy that's agitating toward deep structural change.There's something implacable, earnest, and righteously angry in the air. And it raises all kinds of questions for burned-out Boomers and jaded Gen Xers who've been ground down to the stump by the mostly losing battles of the past 30 years. Can it be - at long last - that Americans have, simply, had enough? Are we, finally, stepping out to take back our government - and with it, control of our own future? Is this simply a shifting political season - the kind we get every 20 to 30 years - or is there something deeper going on here? Do we dare to raise our hopes that this time, we're going to finally win a few? Just how ready is this country for big, serious, forward-looking change?Recently, I came across a pocket of sociological research that suggested a tantalizing answer to these questions - and also that America may be far more ready for far more change than anyone really believes is possible at this moment. In fac
thinkahol *

Speech on media propaganda - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com - 0 views

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    The 30-minute speech I gave last month at the Symphony Space in New York is now available on video, and is posted below in three YouTube segments (the first segment also contains the 4-minute introduction of my speech). The speech pertains to the evolution of my views on media criticism, the nature of media propaganda and what drives it, and what can be done to combat it. A DVD of the entire event -- featuring the three other speeches: from Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore -- is available at FAIR's website. I want to note one example, from today, that vividly illustrates many of the themes I discussed in that speech.  It is found in the following passage from this Reuters article on Obama's escalation of the covert war in Yemen and his targeting of U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki for assassination: A U.S. official confirmed to Reuters that a U.S. strike last Friday killed Abu Ali al-Harithi, a midlevel al Qaeda operative, which followed last month's attempted strike against Anwar al-Awlaki, the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Whether Awlaki has any operational role in Al Qaeda at all is a matter of intense controversy.  The U.S. Government has repeatedly asserted that he does, but has presented no verifiable evidence to support that accusation.  But what is not in dispute is the notion that Awlaki is "the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula."  He unquestionably is not, and never has been, as multiple Yemen experts have repeatedly noted.  The Reuters claim is factually and entirely false. Whatever one's views are on Obama's assassination program, targeting U.S. citizens without due process obviously raises extraordinary and vitally important questions.  As The New York Times' Scott Shane put it when confirming Awlaki's inclusion on Obama's hit list: "The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen. . . . It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an America
Chuck Bartok

Should We Retire the One Dollar Bill? - 0 views

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    Rep. David Schweikert (Ariz.) and two other House Republicans - including supercommittee co-chairman Jeb Hensarling (Texas) - introduced legislation last week aimed at retiring the paper dollar.... According to the proponents the retirement of the US One Dollar Bill could save save billions of dollars over the next few decades by transitioning to a one dollar coin in four years, or as soon as $600 million worth of dollar coins are in circulation. Rep. Schweikert said, "Metal coins would last longer and therefore save money. But two Massachusetts Lawmakers, Scott Brown and John Kerry oppose the suggestion on ground it costs too much too produce the coins.... But it seem to me they would last longer...isn't that what smart business buy, products that are Value Purchased not cost purchased. It is also interesting also The Dollar Coin Alliance, which favors the House bill, said the two Massachusetts senators have a specific reason for wanting to protect the dollar bill, arguing that the Senate bill is aimed at protecting Massachusetts-based Crane & Co., the sole-source supplier of paper used to produce dollar bills. So what else is NEW! More cronyism? A poll conducted this year for the Dollar Coin Alliance showed 65 percent of Americans favored the move to a coin, and that more supported it once they realized the savings associated with the switch. And other countries who have done same have benefited overall in the Cost of Producing currency. "Other countries that have replaced a low-denomination note with a coin, such as Canada and the United Kingdom, stopped producing the note," the GAO said in March. "Officials from both countries told GAO that this step was essential to the success of their transition and that, with no alternative to the note, public resistance dissipated within a few years."
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    Always appreciate comments on the blog posts
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

Waterboarding: A Tortured History : NPR - 0 views

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    Explaining the practice that many neocons like to pretend isn't torture.
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

Preservationists in Chicago Fear Losing Ground to Condos - New York Times - 0 views

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    Watch what's left of a once distinguished architectural legacy be destroyed because our city is run by idiots. Consider this quote: ""Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," Alderman Matlak said. "A lot of people don't want 19th-century buildings.I grew up in a frame house. My bedroom was 8 by 8. People don't want that now." Then - here's a wild idea. Maybe they might try moving into one of the neighborhoods that isn't historic? Which, in Chicago, is almost all of them, now? Speaking as somebody who lives in Chicago, I can report that the difference of opinion between the developers and the preservationists on this is not an honest one; the rate of demolition has not been exaggerated one bit.
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

American Thinker Blog: No Science, Please � We're British - 0 views

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    Please, somebody, tell me that this isn't true ...
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

John Bolton at CPAC: The Benefits of Nuking Chicago | Mother Jones - 0 views

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    Interesting how the warhead seems to be going off on the campus of Columbia College. I guess the bad guys are going to bring us to out knees by cutting off the supply of fashion illustrators and fiction writers? Those fiends! We would have never seen it coming. If you're read my stuff, you know exactly what I think of the Bush administration and how happy I was to see it leave Washington. I like a good neocon bash maybe even more than the next man. But, while this take on Bolton's remarks has been a popular one, I don't feel it's a reasonable one. As the article itself quotes Mr.Bolton "The fact is on foreign policy I don't think President Obama thinks it's a priority," said Bolton. "He said during the campaign he thought Iran was a tiny threat. Tiny, tiny depending on how many nuclear weapons they are ultimately able to deliver on target. Its, uh, its tiny compared to the Soviet Union, but is the loss of one American city" - here Bolton changes his tone subtly to prepare for the joke - "pick one at random - Chicago - is that a tiny threat?" Yes, there's a joke in that remark, but it's not the one that Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones wants it to be. The point of the joke is that if even one city gets hit, that's somebody's home and to that somebody, the difference between a vast nuclear arsenal and a small one isn't going to matter much. By naming the president's hometown in the hypothetical, he invites the president to put himself in the shoes of that person left facing a detonation close at hand. We don't have to guess how Obama would feel about such a prospect; it's the same way anybody would feel about it. To suggest, as the author does, that the audience validated a hope for mass murder by laughing at the joke is a disingenuous attempt to produce a hysterical response for the political gain of an already victorious faction. It's a cheap shot, and the author should have known better. This makes the Bush Administration and neoconservatism look bett
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

Op-Ed Columnist - Forgive and Forget? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    Paul Krugman says something about Obama's statement that there would be no widespread investigation of Bush administration abuses that should be common sense, but sadly isn't, and so badly needs to be said. Found on Furl.
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

Another Crazy Idea: Wash Your Food Before You Eat It | Ayliana87's Xanga Site - Weblog - 0 views

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    A Libertarian rebuttal to the post two links down on my profile, written a little more intelligently than most, from somebody who I find myself liking a little - but still showing some of the glib blindness that drove me away from that movement. Eg. responding to the report of the selling of tainted meat by saying that one could prevent the problem by cooking the meat until it's medium (ie. greyish red, instead of grey outright, and only mostly tasteless). "See", she seems to be saying, "even without governmental regulation, you have a choice", not quite getting that it isn't a reasonable choice. Selling meat that doesn't have to be cooked to death to be safe is absolutely possible; my grocery does it with regularity and I cook it rare with regularity, without problems following. So is it reasonable that people in places where the merchants or those they buy from are not as ethical should have to maybe choose between enjoying their meals, or surviving them, just so that somebody else be slimy without undue interference? With how ever much charm, the author of this piece answers that question with a resounding "yes", and shows why Libertarianism is, as I've said, not about the promotion of personal freedom so much as it is about the promotion of personal irresponsibility.
thinkahol *

President Obama's Real But Risky Proposal - 0 views

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    'The underlying problem isn't the budget deficit. It's that so much income and wealth are going to the top that most Americans don't have the purchasing power to sustain a strong recovery.' Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
thinkahol *

Elections Have Consequences - 0 views

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    We are at a pivotal moment in American history, and many Americans watching the deficit talks in Washington are confused, perplexed, angry and frustrated. This country, which has paid its debts from Day 1, must pay its debts. Anyone who says it is not a big deal for this country to default clearly does not understand what he or she is talking about. This is a nation whose faith and credit has been the gold standard of countries throughout the world. Some people simply say we're not going to pay our debt, that there's nothing to really worry about. Those are people who are wishing our economy harm for political reasons, and those are people whose attitudes will have terrible consequences for virtually every working family in this country in terms of higher interest rates, in terms of significant job loss, in terms of making a very unstable global economy even more unstable. Our right-wing friends in the House of Representatives have given us an option. What they have said is end Medicare as we know it and force elderly people, many of whom don't have the money, to pay substantially more for their health care. So when you're 70 under their plan and you get sick and you don't have a whole lot of income, we don't know what happens to you. They forget to tell us that if their plan was passed you're going to have to pay a heck of a lot more for the prescription drugs you're getting today. They we're going to throw millions of kids off health insurance. If your mom or dad is in a nursing home and that nursing home bill is paid significantly by Medicaid and Medicaid isn't paying anymore, they forgot to tell us what happens to your mom or dad in that nursing home. What happens? And what happens today if you are unemployed and you're not able to get unemployment extension? What happens if you are a middle-class family desperately trying to send their kids to college and you make savage cuts to Pell grants and you can't go to college? What does it mean for the nation if we
thinkahol *

OWS's Beef: Wall Street Isn't Winning It's Cheating | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone - 0 views

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    When Joe Homeowner bought too much house, essentially betting that home prices would go up, and losing his bet when they dropped, he was an irresponsible putz who shouldn't whine about being put on the street. But when banks bet billions on a firm like AIG that was heavily invested in mortgages, they were making the same bet that Joe Homeowner made, leaving themselves hugely exposed to a sudden drop in home prices. But instead of being asked to "suck it in and cope" when that bet failed, the banks instead went straight to Washington for a bailout -- and got it.
Bakari Chavanu

toledoblade.com -- - 0 views

  • He believes our economic system has lost its way after decades of perversion by greedy politicians in Washington and money-minded fatcats on Wall Street and in corporate America.
  • And as the great American dream slipped further from the middle class, more consumers relied on credit cards and loans to catch it, and a system based on people buying what they need became one in which people buy what they want but often cannot afford.
  • Perhaps the film's most powerful statement is Moore's claim that 1 percent of the richest Americans own 95 percent of our nation's wealth.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Capitalism: A Love Story contends that such a movement has already begun. Families being evicted from their homes by bank foreclosures refuse to leave, the film shows, even when law enforcement shows up. A successful workers' strike in Chicago proved that the power to overcome corporate greed and mishandling still rests with the people.
    • Bakari Chavanu
       
      This may be a hopeful way to look at it, but I really doubt it. Most people don't have a clue about what to do. There's very little or effective organized resistance.
  • The film isn't so much Moore piling on our battered, bruised capitalism as it is loaded commentary on what got us here. The evidence is damning, and thought-provoking to those who will give the film a chance.
  • Perhaps Capitalism: A Love Story will be the impetus we need for wholesale change. Or if change is too ambitious, given our circumstances, the film should at least spark meaningful dialogue and rigorous debate, something Moore supporters and detractors alike should welcome.
thinkahol *

The US Isn't Leaving Iraq, It's Rebranding the Occupation | CommonDreams.org - 0 views

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    For most people in Britain and the US, Iraq is already history. Afghanistan has long since taken the lion's share of media attention, as the death toll of Nato troops rises inexorably. Controversy about Iraq is now almost entirely focused on the original decision to invade: what's happening there in 2010 barely registers.
alex thorn

Think Progress » Blog Archive » Krauthammer: McCain Has 'Hidden Agenda' To 'Kill The United Nations' - 0 views

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    McCain appears to be calling for a new international alliance focused on democracy. But isn't that alliance the United Nations? McCain's "leage of Democracies" would undoubtedly resemble a tougher, more militarily aggressive, UN dominated by American players and ideologies. Kind of like a UN you can invade the world with.
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    Numerous media outlets interpreted McCain's speech as a call for "cooperation" and "collaboration" with allies and the rest of the world, "drawing a sharp contrast to the past eight years under President Bush." But last night on Fox News, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer revealed the true meaning behind McCain's "League of Democracies":
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    That is EXACTLY what I thought when I read about this..."league of democracies" = tool of US to keep certain players out of the mix
Skeptical Debunker

Schwarzenegger says Obama's stimulus created jobs - Yahoo! News - 0 views

  • At a conservative gathering in Washington this week, former presidential candidate Mitt Romney blasted the $787 billion stimulus bill and asserted it did not create any new jobs. The California governor, asked about the comments on the ABC news program "This Week," said many Republican politicians were railing against the program while seeking stimulus funds for their own districts. "You have a lot of the Republicans running around and pushing back on the stimulus money and saying this doesn't create any new jobs," Schwarzenegger said. "Then they go out and they do the photo ops and they are posing with the big check and they say 'Isn't this great?'"
Skeptical Debunker

Les Leopold: Why are We Afraid to Create the Jobs We Need? - 0 views

  • 1. The private sector will create enough jobs, if the government gets out of the way. Possibly, but when? Right now more than 2.7 percent of our entire population has been unemployed for more than 26 weeks -- an all time-record since the government began compiling that data in 1948. No one is predicting that the private sector is about to go on a hiring spree. In fact, many analysts think it'll take more than a decade for the labor market to fully recover. You can't tell the unemployed to wait ten years. Counting on a private sector market miracle is an exercise in faith-based economics. There simply is no evidence that the private sector can create on its own the colossal number of jobs we need. If we wanted to go down to a real unemployment rate of 5% ("full employment"), we'd have to create about 22.4 million jobs. (See Leo Hindery's excellent accounting.) We'd need over 100,000 new jobs every month just to keep up with population growth. It's not fair to the unemployed to pray for private sector jobs that might never come through. 2. We can't afford it. Funding public sector jobs will explode the deficit and the country will go broke: This argument always makes intuitive sense because most of us think of the federal budget as a giant version of our household budget - we've got to balance the books, right? I'd suggest we leave that analogy behind. Governments just don't work the same way as families do. We have to look at the hard realities of unemployment, taxes and deficits. For instance, every unemployed worker is someone who is not paying taxes. If we're not collecting taxes from the unemployed, then we've got to collect more taxes from everyone who is working. Either that, or we have to cut back on services. If we go with option one and raise taxes on middle and low income earners, they'll have less money to spend on goods and services. When demand goes down, businesses contract--meaning layoffs in the private sector. But if we go with option two and cut government services, we'll have to lay off public sector workers. Now we won't be collecting their taxes, and the downward cycle continues. Plus, we don't get the services. Or, we could spend the money to create the jobs and just let the deficit rise a bit more. The very thought makes politicians and the public weak in the knees. But in fact this would start a virtuous cycle that would eventually reduce the deficit: Our newly reemployed people start paying taxes again. And with their increased income, they start buying more goods and services. This new demand leads to more hiring in the private sector. These freshly hired private sector workers start paying taxes too. The federal budget swells with new revenue, and the deficit drops. But let's say you just can't stomach letting the deficit rise right now. You think the government is really out of money--or maybe you hate deficits in principle. There's an easy solution to your problem. Place a windfall profits tax on Wall Street bonuses. Impose a steep tax on people collecting $3 million or more. (Another way to do it is to tax the financial transactions involved in speculative investments by Wall Street and the super-rich.) After all, those fat bonuses are unearned: The entire financial sector is still being bankrolled by the taxpayers, who just doled out $10 trillion (not billion) in loans and guarantees. Besides, taxing the super-rich doesn't put a dent in demand for goods and services the way taxing other people does. The rich can only buy so much. The rest goes into investment, much of it speculative. So a tax on the super rich reduces demand for the very casino type investments that got us into this mess.
  • 3. Private sector jobs are better that public sector jobs. Why is that? There is a widely shared perception that having a public job is like being on the dole, while having a private sector job is righteous. Maybe people sense that in the private sector you are competing to sell your goods and services in the rough and tumble of the marketplace--and so you must be producing items that buyers want and need. Government jobs are shielded from market forces. But think about some of our greatest public employment efforts. Was there anything wrong with the government workers at NASA who landed us on the moon? Or with the public sector workers in the Manhattan project charged with winning World War II? Are teachers at public universities somehow less worthy than those in private universities? Let's be honest: a good job is one that contributes to the well-being of society and that provides a fair wage and benefits. During an employment crisis, those jobs might best come directly from federal employment or indirectly through federal contracts and grants to state governments. This myth also includes the notion that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. Sometimes it is, but mostly it isn't. Take health care, which accounts for nearly 17 percent of our entire economy. Medicare is a relative model of efficiency, with much lower administrative costs than private health insurers. The average private insurance company worker is far less productive and efficient than an equivalent federal employee working for Medicare. (See study by Himmelstein, Woolhandler and Wolfe) 4. Big government suffocates our freedom. The smaller the central government, the better -- period, the end. This is the hardest argument to refute because it is about ideology not facts. Simply put, many Americans believe that the federal government is bad by definition. Some don't like any government at all. Others think power should reside mostly with state governments. This idea goes all the way back to the anti-federalists led by Thomas Jefferson, who feared that yeomen farmers would be ruled (and feasted upon) by far-away economic elites who controlled the nation's money and wealth. In modern times this has turned into a fear of a totalitarian state with the power to tell us what to do and even deny us our most basic liberties. A government that creates millions of jobs could be seen as a government that's taking over the economy (like taking over GM). It just gets bigger and more intrusive. And more corrupt and pork-ridden. (There's no denying we've got some federal corruption, but again the private sector is hardly immune to the problem. In fact, it lobbies for the pork each and every day.) It's probably impossible to convince anyone who hates big government to change their minds. But we need to consider what state governments can and cannot do to create jobs. Basically, their hands are tied precisely because they are not permitted by our federal constitution to run up debt. So when tax revenues plunge (as they still are doing) states have to cut back services and/or increase taxes. In effect, the states act as anti-stimulus programs. They are laying off workers and will continue to do so until either the private sector or the federal government creates many more jobs. Unlike the feds, states are in no position to regulate Wall Street. They're not big enough, not strong enough and can easily be played off against each other. While many fear big government, I fear high unemployment even more. That's because the Petri dish for real totalitarianism is high unemployment -- not the relatively benign big government we've experienced in America. When people don't have jobs and see no prospect for finding them, they get desperate -- maybe desperate enough to follow leaders who whip up hatred and trample on people's rights in their quest for power. Violent oppression of minority groups often flows from high unemployment. So does war. No thanks. I'll take a government that puts people to work even if it has to hire 10 million more workers itself. We don't have to sacrifice freedom to put people to work. We just have to muster the will to hire them.
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    Unemployment is the scourge of our nation. It causes death and disease. It eats away at family life. It erodes our sense of confidence and well being. And it's a profound insult to the richest country on Earth. Yet it takes a minor miracle for the Senate just to extend our paltry unemployment benefits and COBRA health insurance premium subsidies for a month. Workers are waiting for real jobs, but our government no longer has the will to create them. How can we allow millions to go without work while Wall Street bankers--the ones who caused people to lose their jobs in the first place-- "earn" record bonuses? Why are we putting up with this? It's not rocket science to create decent and useful jobs, (although it does go beyond the current cranial capacity of the U.S. Senate). It's obvious that we desperately need to repair our infrastructure, increase our energy efficiency, generate more renewable energy, and invest in educating our young. We need millions of new workers to do all this work--right now. Our government has all the money and power (and yes, borrowing capacity) it needs to hire these workers directly or fund contractors and state governments to hire them. Either way, workers would get the jobs, and we would get safer bridges and roads, a greener environment, better schools, and a brighter future all around. So what are we waiting for?
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

The Memory Hole > The 9/11 Artwork the Public Isn't Allowed to See - 0 views

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    "Eric Fischl ... created this bronze sculpture of a woman plummeting to her death, basing it on the many people who did just that during the 9/11 attacks ... ... Immediately, members of the public began complaining about the upsetting nature of the piece, and administrators at the center quickly covered it in cloth and hid it behind a screen." Right, because we wouldn't want to make mass murder look like something horrible? Watching policy getting made to appease those who don't get the point.
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