America’s Spoiled Voters, in Iowa and Elsewhere

By Michael Kinsley - Jan 4, 2012

Six days ago, the Rick Santorum boom was still a glint in Mike Allen’s eye. In a Des Moines Register poll published the weekend before the Iowa caucuses, 41 percent of respondents said they weren’t sure whom they were going to support.

And these were people who expressed an intention to attend a caucus. They had an inclination. But, like diners poring over the menu at a fancy restaurant, they might yet change their minds.

Indeed, if the polls are to be believed, many Iowa voters must have changed their preferences multiple times over the past few months, as the electorate as a whole (to lower the tone of the metaphor) seemed to pick up one cantaloupe after another, always looking for perfection, never finding it, putting the melon back and reaching for another. The fruit that started at the bottom of the bin -- Santorum -- got a big squeeze at the end.

Chart of the Day: Presidential Recess Appointments

—By Adam Serwer | Wed Jan. 4, 2012 10:04 AM PST

President Barack Obama used his authority to appoint former Ohio attorney general Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Wednesday without approval from the Senate, which was in recess. By doing so, Obama defied Senate Republicans who had sought to block any and all such recess appointments by holding "pro-forma" sessions for the sole purpose of obstructing the president's ability to fill executive branch and judicial vacancies.

Occupy Wall Street Builds Facebook Alternative

Occupy Wall Street activists are creating their own social networking site, hoping to establish protected digital protest space as physical camps continue to face legal problems.

The site, tentatively named The Global Square and expected to launch later this month, hopes to provide a place “where people of all nations can come together as equals to participate in the coordination of collective actions and the formulation of common goals and aspirations,” according to a post by Occupy-blog RoarMag.

30 Statistics That Show The Middle Class Is Dying Right In Front Of Our Eyes

Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse | Jan. 3, 2012, 11:54 AM

Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most vibrant middle class that the world has ever seen. Unfortunately, that is rapidly changing.

The statistics that you are about to read prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the U.S. middle class is dying right in front of our eyes as we enter 2012.

The decline of the middle class is not something that has happened all of a sudden. Rather, there has been a relentless grinding down of the middle class over the last several decades.

Tough Luck, Americans: The American Dream of Upward Mobility Is Dead

By Steven D | Sourced from Booman Tribune
Posted at January 5, 2012, 7:16 am

To anyone paying attention to the growing wealth inequality in the United States over the past 50 years it should come as no surprise that their is less economic mobility in America than in many other developed countries. Our pundits and politicians almost unanimously extol the notion that our freedoms have led us to be the most exceptional nation on earth, where the poorest of the poor, through hard work can raise themselves up to the height of the economic food chain. Any man or woman can become a millionaire! You just have to want it bad enough. America is a golden land of opportunity and if you aren't rich its your own damn fault, you lazy dirty [insert hippy or the name of the requisite ethnic group you intend to demean here].

10 Ways Right-Wing Christian Groups Will Likely Shove Religion Down Your Throat This Year

Church & State Magazine / By Simon Brown

A surging religious right means daunting challenges for keeping Church and State separate. 

January 4, 2012  |  The following piece comes from Church and State Magazine, published by Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

You don’t have to look far or wide to see signs that the Religious Right was resurgent in 2011.

From the halls of Congress, where the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly urged public schools to post “In God We Trust” displays in classrooms, to the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., that was attended by 3,000 fundamentalist Christian activists, the Religious Right’s influence loomed large.

Since 2012 is an election year, we expect the Religious Right to use this growing influence to wage an all-out war to shape the U.S. government into a body that will do its bidding.

7 Ways to Really Take the Ax to Wall Street

We're talking about how to save democracy from the plutocratic rule of elite financiers. It's time to think big.

January 4, 2012  |  As we’ve learned the hard way, the core of our modern capitalist economy is finance, and finance is run entirely by a few large Wall Street firms. But here’s the ultimate irony: while modern capitalism depends on Wall Street, Wall Street no longer depends on capitalist principles. In finance a new system has emerged that makes a mockery of the idea that entrepreneurs should be rewarded for their successes and suffer losses when they fail.  

 

Capitalist Values Vanish from Wall Street

This week we are reminded again that the ideals of capitalism are a joke on Wall Street, as the heads of the largest Wall Street banks earn enormous incomes while the values of their banks plummet. “According to data from Rochdale Securities analyst Dick Bove, the heads of major banking groups including JPMorganChase (JPM), Goldman Sachs (GS) and Bank of America (BAC) are out-earning their employees and shareholders even as shares of bank stocks as a group lost about 26 percent [in 2011].” (Ron Haruni, “Big Bank CEOs Walk Away with Big Bucks in 2011”) 

Solar Power Off the Grid: Energy Access for World’s Poor

by Carl Pope

After the Durban talks last month, climate realists must face the reality that “shared sacrifice,” however necessary eventually, has proven a catastrophically bad starting point for global collaboration. Nations have already spent decades debating who was going to give up how much first in exchange for what. So we need to seek opportunities — arenas where there are advantages, not penalties, for those who first take action — both to achieve first-round emission reductions and to build trust and cooperation.

One of the major opportunities lies in providing energy access for the more than 1.2 billion people who don’t have electricity, most of whom, in business-as-usual scenarios, still won’t have it in 2030. These are the poorest people on the planet. Ironically, the world’s poorest can best afford the most sophisticated lighting — off-grid combinations of solar panels, power electronics, and LED lights. And this creates an opportunity for which the economics are compelling, the moral urgency profound, the development benefits enormous, and the potential leverage game changing.

We Need FDR-Style Proposals to Solve All Our Big Problems

Tuesday, 01/3/2012 - 10:19 am by Jon Rynn

The New Deal took on many interconnected issues all at once. We need to do the same.

Both Democrats and environmentalists seem to be searching for new sources of support, according to articles from Thomas Edsall and Leslie Kaufman. For Democrats, the problem is the state of mind of the “white working class,” while for environmentalists the problem is to convince the public that something should be done about climate change. In both cases, the dilemma is the same: the solutions offered do not solve the existing problems, and the public knows it. The working class would likely be wooed if someone proposed a government-led policy of putting millions of people to work rebuilding our infrastructure and the manufacturing base. The general public would likely back policies to prevent global warming if someone advanced a credible program of building a carbon-free economy. Both could be combined in a program that would employ tens of millions to build sustainable transportation, energy, and urban infrastructure, as I have proposed. It will take a holistic — and therefore credible — plan to convince voters.

Climate change – our real bequest to future generations

Deficit hawks try to scare us about the debt we're leaving. That's economic nonsense – unlike the costs of global warming

Dean Baker
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 3 January 2012 08.00 EST

It is remarkable how efforts to reduce the government deficit/debt are often portrayed as a generational issue, while efforts to reduce global warming are almost never framed in this way. This contrast is striking because the issues involved in reducing the deficit or debt have little direct relevance to distribution between generations, whereas global warming is almost entirely a question of distribution between generations.

Seeing the debt as an issue between generations is wrong in almost every dimension. The idea that future generations will somehow be stuck with some huge tab in the form of the national debt suffers from the simple logical problem that we are all going to die. At some point, everyone who owns the debt being issued today, or over the next two decades, will be dead. They will have to pass the ownership of the debt to someone else – in other words, their children or grandchildren. This means that the debt is not money that our children and grandchildren will be paying to someone else. It is money that they will be paying to themselves.

Santorum: States Should Have The Right To Outlaw Birth Control

By Igor Volsky on Jan 3, 2012 at 10:25 am

Rick Santorum reiterated his belief that states should have the right to outlaw contraception during an interview with ABC News yesterday, saying, “The state has a right to do that, I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that. It is not a constitutional right, the state has the right to pass whatever statues they have.”

Santorum has long opposed the Supreme Court’s 1965 ruling “that invalidated a Connecticut law banning contraception” and has also pledged to completely defund federal funding for contraception if elected president.

Debacle! How Two Wars in the Greater Middle East Revealed the Weakness of the Global Superpower

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

It was to be the war that would establish empire as an American fact.  It would result in a thousand-year Pax Americana.  It was to be “mission accomplished” all the way.  And then, of course, it wasn’t.  And then, almost nine dismal years later, it was over (sorta).

It was the Iraq War, and we were the uninvited guests who didn’t want to go home.  To the last second, despite President Obama’s repeated promise that all American troops were leaving, despite an agreement the Iraqi government had signed with George W. Bush’s administration in 2008, America’s military commanders continued to lobby and Washington continued to negotiate for 10,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops to remain in-country as advisors and trainers.

Report Says ALEC Wields ‘Disturbing Level of Influence’ In Virginia

Nick R. Martin January 4, 2012, 2:18 PM
Updated: January 4, 2012, 3:39PM

An investigation released this week says that Virginia lawmakers take a “disturbing” number of cues from a conservative group that pushes model bills on state legislatures nationwide.

The Virginia General Assembly introduced at least 50 bills since 2007 that appear to be near carbon copies of legislation first imagined by the American Legislative Exchange Council, more widely known as ALEC, the report found.

Japanese-American who fought WWII internment camps dies

By Agence France-Presse
Wednesday, January 4, 2012

OTTAWA — Gordon Hirabayashi, who fought the United States’ internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, has died in Edmonton, Alberta at the age of 93, said local media.

“My dad… passed away early this morning (Monday),” his son, Jay Hirabayashi, said on Facebook. “He was an American hero … who taught me about the values of honesty, integrity and justice.”

Our Guide to the Best Coverage on Rick Santorum and His Record

by Lena Groeger
ProPublica, Jan. 3, 2012, 9:16 p.m.

The Basics 

Rick Santorum's strong showing in the Iowa caucuses has vaulted him from obscurity to presidential contender. Just a few months ago, Santorum barely merited a mention as Republican voters fell in and out of love with Rick Perry, Herman Cain and New Gingrich.

So who is this darling of the evangelical movement?

No longer the land of opportunity

By Harold Meyerson,

“Over the past three years, Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an Entitlement Society,” Mitt Romney wrote in USA Today last month. The coming election, Romney told Wall Street Journal editors last month, will be “a very simple choice” between Obama’s “European social democratic” vision and “a merit-based opportunity society — an American-style society — where people earn their rewards based on their education, their work, their willingness to take risks and their dreams.”

Romney’s assertions are the centerpiece of his, and his party’s, critique not just of Obama but of American liberalism generally. But they fail to explain how and why the American economy has declined the past few decades — in good part because they betray no awareness that Europe’s social democracies now fit the description of “merit-based opportunity societies” much more than ours does.

Inside President Obama's Reelection Machine

Yes We Can (Can't We?)

by Andrew Romano Jan 2, 2012 12:00 AM EST

While the GOP votes, team Obama is crafting a juggernaut. Andrew Romano talks to top advisers about their 2012 strategy—including David Axelrod, who admits that he shares some of the blame for the president's dismal approval rating.

The Obama campaign is not kidding around. I recently visited its headquarters in Chicago, and I can personally vouch for how much it’s not kidding around. Yes, there was a blue Ping-Pong table in the middle of the office—custom-made, evidently, because the Obama 2012 logo was emblazoned on it. (Twice.) There were printouts of people’s nicknames—Sandals! Shermanator!—where corporate nameplates usually go. There was a mesh trucker hat from South Dakota, which was blaze orange and said “Big Cock Country” on the crown. There was a cardboard speech bubble (“nom nom data nom”) affixed to an Uglydoll. There was miniature air-hockey table. A narwhal mural. A stuffed Rastafarian banana.

Is Privacy Act Violated as Voting War’s GOP Hit Man is Fed Leaks By Justice Department Mole?
Will the DOJ investigate leaks in attacks on Voting Section employees and major voting rights decisions? 

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on January 2, 2012, Printed on January 3, 2012
A crusading GOP critic of the Obama Justice Department’s Voting Section, Hans von Spakovsky, has admitted to having Department sources that are leaking apparently confidential and highly personal information that he is using to viciously attack Voting Section staff and to smear the Department at large.


Leaking such information—including details from ongoing Inspector General inquiries into a previous media leak and detailing the behavior of a DOJ employee related to that internal investigation—would not only violate DOJ confidentiality rules, but also could violate the federal Privacy Act, which governs how agencies are to control records.

End of the Pro-Democracy Pretense

by Glenn Greenwald

 

Media coverage of the Arab Spring somehow depicted the U.S. as sympathetic to and supportive of the democratic protesters notwithstanding the nation’s decades-long financial and military support for most of the targeted despots. That’s because a central staple of American domestic propaganda about its foreign policy is that the nation is “pro-democracy” — that’s the banner under which Americans wars are typically prettified — even though “democracy” in this regard really means “a government which serves American interests regardless of how their power is acquired,” while “despot” means “a government which defies American orders even if they’re democratically elected.”

It’s always preferable when pretenses of this sort are dropped — the ugly truth is better than pretty lies — and the events in the Arab world have forced the explicit relinquishment of this pro-democracy conceit. That’s because one of the prime aims of America’s support for Arab dictators has been to ensure that the actual views and beliefs of those nations’ populations remain suppressed, because those views are often so antithetical to the perceived national interests of the U.S. government. The last thing the U.S. government has wanted (or wants now) is actual democracy in the Arab world, in large part because democracy will enable the populations’ beliefs — driven by high levels of anti-American sentiment and opposition to Israeli actions – to be empowered rather than ignored.

Paul Krugman: Nobody Understands Debt

In 2011, as in 2010, America was in a technical recovery but continued to suffer from disastrously high unemployment. And through most of 2011, as in 2010, almost all the conversation in Washington was about something else: the allegedly urgent issue of reducing the budget deficit.

This misplaced focus said a lot about our political culture, in particular about how disconnected Congress is from the suffering of ordinary Americans. But it also revealed something else: when people in D.C. talk about deficits and debt, by and large they have no idea what they’re talking about — and the people who talk the most understand the least.

How the Tax Code is Skewed in the 1%'s Favor

A member of Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength explains why the 99% get shafted by tax policy.

 

Although relatively straightforward to analyze, the issue of whether the rich pay their fair share in taxes has become mired in confusion. Much of the confusion stems from two facts which everyone acknowledges: First, the rich pay a (somewhat) larger share of total taxes than any other group of income earners; and second, they pay more proportionally on the federal level—but only on the federal level—than other groups. Despite these two facts, the overwhelming weight of evidence strongly suggests that, at this time, the rich do not pay their fair share and should pay more.

Seven Economic Policy Goals For Progressives In 2012

By Travis Waldron on Jan 1, 2012 at 9:25 am

At best, 2011 can be described as a middling year for progressives when it comes to the economy. Though the economy continued its modest recovery, and despite recent positive signs of improvement, many progressive goals went unfulfilled.


Thanks to GOP obstruction, no widespread jobs package passed, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is still without a director, and important areas of investment faced unnecessary budget cuts on both the state and federal level. Progressives were, however, able to block much of the House GOP’s radical agenda — preventing Republicans from gutting Medicare and thwarting repeated efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and Wall Street reform laws.

Vampire Squid Watch: 4 Scary Economic Trends for 2012

Top economic thinkers explain why 2012 will be a year of continued – and escalating – predation by financiers. 

By Lynn Parramore, AlterNet
Posted on December 29, 2011, Printed on January 2, 2012

Having been seen to twitch – ever so slightly – in 2011 as global protests erupted, the vampire squid is stirring in its evil lair. Reports of sucking noises and new tentacles sprouting in every direction tell us that the global financial monster is poised to steal yet more wealth and resources from the public in the coming year. Top economic thinkers have shared their forecasts with AlterNet, and the focus is clear: 2012 will be a year of continued – and escalating – predation by financiers. Their influence over political, financial, and economic activity is likely to grow – along with potential for harm.

Tax gift to the rich

How one loophole helps wealthy Americans pay less taxes

By John Aloysius Farrell

Todd Dagres, a prominent venture capitalist and independent movie producer, earned $3.5 million in 2003, and paid not a cent in federal income tax.

The IRS challenged the math, and sent Dagres a bill for $981,980 in back taxes, plus $196,369 in penalties.

So Dagres lawyered up. His attorneys waived one lucrative tax break to exploit an even better one, and claimed victory in the case in March.

How We Got Here With the Economy and How to Get Out

by Robert Freeman

It’s easy to get fixated with small-bore issues on the economy, even if they don’t seem so small-bore at the time. Stimulus packages. Bailouts. Debt ceilings. Deficit commissions. Payroll tax-cut extensions. They seem like life and death issues while they’re being fought out.


But, in fact, they are distractions from the one real question that dominates all others, which is this: for whom should the economy be run? Should it be operated “to promote the general welfare” of 297 million people, the 99 percent? Or should it be run to benefit 3 million, the one percent?

Nullification Makes a Comeback

—By Kevin Drum | Fri Dec. 30, 2011 3:00 AM PST

In the 19th century, the theory of nullification, and the crisis it provoked, was all about states' rights. Nullification advocates argued that the constitution was a compact between sovereign states, and therefore states could choose to ignore federal laws that they considered unconstitutional.

The Civil War largely put an end to this clash, but in the 21st century there's a new theory of nullification. This one, though, isn't about a conflict between states and the federal government. It's about a conflict within the federal government. There isn't yet any modern-day John Calhoun to articulate this new theory of nullification in detail, but the nickel version is pretty simple: it says that a single senator can nullify a duly passed statute of the United States.

What You Didn't Know About the South: Surprises from a White Southerner

“The South” is an idea too often wrapped in a fog that emanates from the left as well as the right.

By Lynn Parramore, AlterNet
Posted on December 30, 2011, Printed on January 1, 2012

Yesterday I read an article by Peter Birkenhead, a Californian, who recently visited Louisiana and found “The South” a benighted land dominated by misty-eyed racists in denial of their slave history (See " Why the White South Is Still in Denial About Slavery"). His experience at a slave cabin-turned restaurant leaves him outraged and ready to send back his gumbo, never to return to Dixie.

I know the feeling. The South is my birthplace, and there are times when I'd like to cast it off, too. But my southern drawl and my heritage come along with me wherever I go. So we've had to come to terms with each other, despite an adulthood spent in New York.