Paul Krugman: Obama Gets Real

Paul Krugman | New York Times
5 Dec 2013

excerpt:

Much of our political and pundit class remains devoted to the notion that rising inequality, to the extent that it’s an issue at all, is all about workers lacking the right skills and education. But the president now seems to accept progressive arguments that education is at best one of a number of concerns, that America’s growing class inequality largely reflects political choices, like the failure to raise the minimum wage along with inflation and productivity.

And because the president was willing to assign much of the blame for rising inequality to bad policy, he was also more forthcoming than in the past about ways to change the nation’s trajectory, including a rise in the minimum wage, restoring labor’s bargaining power, and strengthening, not weakening, the safety net.

And there was this: “When it comes to our budget, we should not be stuck in a stale debate from two years ago or three years ago.  A relentlessly growing deficit of opportunity is a bigger threat to our future than our rapidly shrinking fiscal deficit.” Finally! Our political class has spent years obsessed with a fake problem — worrying about debt and deficits that never posed any threat to the nation’s future — while showing no interest in unemployment and stagnating wages. Mr. Obama, I’m sorry to say, bought into that diversion. Now, however, he’s moving on.

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Digging In

How eating cornbread and beans taught me who I was -- and who we are as Texans.

PATRICIA SHARPE | Texas Monthly
December 2013

My mother  was not nostalgic about many things in life, but when it came to cornbread and beans, she was a sentimental fool. She and my father had been teenagers during the Great Depression, and the memory of those hard times was still raw when they married, in 1942. “Many a day, cornbread and beans was all we had to eat,” one of them was likely to say. Neither of them had ever gone to bed hungry, but they came close.

Since Mother firmly believed that those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it, she made sure her three well-fed children had an inkling of what the previous generation had endured. At least a couple of times a year, a big pot of pinto beans seasoned with salt pork would appear on the stove, slowly simmering down almost to mush, along with a pan of yellow cornbread, fragrant and steaming. We would gather around our fifties-era Formica dinette table and fill our cereal bowls and plates. I’m afraid that my two younger brothers and I rolled our eyes, although never so that Mother or Daddy could see us. Still, something must have sunk in, because I often find myself calling up remembrances of meals past as a way of understanding, if only a little, where I came from. Food is about many things—nourishment, pleasure, and culture among them—but it’s also about recognizing who you are, and why. 

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Clinton vs. Warren?

Hendrik Hertzberg | newyorker.com
15 Nov 2013

Warren was a Republican well into her forties (she’s sixty-four, just three years Hillary’s junior)—but, as the saying goes, that could be a feature, not a bug. It makes for a potentially useful party-line-blurring “narrative.” Reagan, too, switched affiliations in midlife. He knew how to talk the other side’s talk, and even as he won the hearts of the far reaches of his adopted party he remained politically bilingual. Warren may turn out to have a similar talent. After all, there are Republicans who are suspicious of the banks, just as there were Democrats who fretted about welfare.
[snip]

When Warren is on her game, she’s almost as good as Hillary’s husband (or Nancy’s) at ’splaining stuff in plain language, above all when she’s talking about her signature issue, financial reform—which, as it happens, is Clinton’s biggest ideological vulnerability with the Democratic-primary electorate. 

[snip]
Should Hillary Clinton end up heading the Democratic ticket in 2016, she would be the most qualified, most fully prepared, most thoroughly tested non-incumbent major-party nominee for President since Henry Clay. She has spent more than twenty years in the crucible. She didn’t while away her eight White House years walled up in the East Wing convent, First Ladylike. She was a full participant in every important political and policy deliberation and in every crisis, foreign and (in both senses) domestic. She was a successful senator, popular with voters and colleagues alike. While her tenure as Secretary of State yielded no spectacular diplomatic coups, she did the job competently and creatively. Her partnership with President Obama was a political masterstroke for them both. She is as Presidential as they come, and, as Scheiber writes, she sounds increasingly “candidential.” (A nice neologism, that.) 

To the extent that Hillary has a problem, though, it may not be only the liberal and populist unease with the Clintons’ history of chumminess with Wall Street—and their role in creating the deregulatory regime that was an indispensable precondition for the 2008 financial crisis and the economic ruin that it has wrought. 

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Audience laughs at Ted Cruz for claiming he 'didn't want a shutdown'

14 Nov 2013 - Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) faced howls of laughter from an audience in Washington, D.C. on Thursday when he claimed that he "didn't want a shutdown" over President Barack Obama's health care reform law.

At The Atlantic's Washington Ideas Forum, Fox News host Chris Wallace pointed out to the Texas Republican that many of his colleagues thought he hurt the party by forcing the government shutdown instead of letting Obamacare fail on its own.

"That ignores who I think was responsible for the shutdown," Cruz replied. "I didn't want a shutdown. Throughout the whole thing, I said we shouldn't have a shutdown."

That remark elicited laughter from the forum audience.


SOURCE

How Big Money and Big Media undermine democracy

8 Nov 2013 | BillMoyers.com

“Democracy means rule of the people: one person, one vote. Dollarocracy means the rule of the dollars: one dollar, one vote. Those with lots of dollars have lots of power. Those with no dollars have no power,”  Robert McChesney tells Bill.

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Want to pay zero taxes? Become a large corporation

Trans-Pacific Partnership is the answer to the question: How can we make the rich richer?

Dean Baker, Truthout | 28 Oct 2013

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) stands at the top of the Obama administration’s trade agenda. The argument from its supporters is that this agreement is part of the never-ending quest for freer trade. The evidence from what we know of this (still secret) pact is that the TPP has little to do with free trade. It can more accurately be described as a pact designed to increase the wealth and power of crony capitalists.

[snip]

The TPP is about crafting rules that will favor big business at the expense of the rest of the population in both the United States and in other countries. For example, we can expect to see limits on the ability of national and sub-national governments to impose environmental restrictions, such as requirements that companies engaging in fracking disclose the list of chemicals they use. There may also be limits on the extent to which governments can restrict the sale of genetically modified foods, with rules on labeling. And, the TPP may prevent governments from imposing restraints on financial firms that would prevent the sort of abuses that we saw during the run-up of the housing bubble. 

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Jon Stewart to The Media for using him to attack Obamacare: 'Go F*ck Yourselves!'

31 Oct 2013 | Wit Happens
The media uses Jon's lampooning of the Affordable Care Act as evidence of its impotence. (05:51)

Russell Brand's revolutionary interview

Actor-slash-comedian-slash-Messiah Russell Brand, in his capacity as guest editor of the New Statesman's just-published revolution-themed issue, was invited to explain to Jeremy Paxman why anyone should listen to a man who has never voted in his life.

"I don't get my authority from this preexisting paradigm which is quite narrow and only serves a few people," Russell responded. "I look elsewhere for alternatives that might be of service to humanity."



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Oasis in a Food Desert | Bill Moyers

An Oasis in a Food Desert

24 Oct 2013 | BillMoyers.com

Since opening last month, America’s first nonprofit grocery store is bringing fresh and affordable fruits, vegetables, meat and dairy to Chester, Pa., a community that has struggled to find healthy food options since the city’s last supermarket closed in 2001.

Chester, home to 35,000 people, has been designated a food desert, a low-income area lacking easy access to healthy food, by the US government. For the residents of Chester the Fare & Square grocery store — seven years in the making — is a welcome relief: “It’s a beautiful supermarket,” said employee Geraldine Carter.

The store is the brainchild of Bill Clark, the executive director of Philabundance, a nonprofit hunger relief organization. Chester has a 36 percent poverty rate and unemployment is 13 percent. Clark said at one time Chester had five grocery stores, but they all closed when the city fell on hard times after manufacturing virtually disappeared.



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Park Avenue: money, power and the American dream - Why Poverty?

740 Park Ave, New York City, is home to some of the wealthiest Americans. Across the Harlem River, 10 minutes to the north, is the other Park Avenue in South Bronx, where more than half the population needs food stamps and children are 20 times more likely to be killed. In the last 30 years, inequality has rocketed in the US -- the American Dream only applies to those with money to lobby politicians for friendly bills on Capitol Hill.



How much inequality is too much? To find out more and get teaching resources linked to the film, go to www.whypoverty.net

Krystal Ball tells the truth on Obamacare

25 Sept 2013 | MSNBC.com
Krystal Ball stated the truth that Conservatives’ alternative to Hillarycare’s liberal healthcare proposal was one by  Wharton Business School professor Marl V. Pauly. That proposal was subsequently adopted by Conservative/Republican Think Tank Heritage Foundation. His proposal required individuals to purchase private insurance called an individual mandate. It was within a bill cosponsored by 22 GOP Senators. It is the same bill that was adopted by Mitt Romney (Romneycare) and it was adopted by President Obama who went against his initial support of Single Payer in order to appease Republicans.

American Winter

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Bernie Sanders: Watch out, 1 Percent

'What the Guardian is doing is important for democracy'

There's been a concerted effort among some politicians and a few of their pet media to accuse The Guardian – you remember, the paper that published the Edward Snowden material? – of treason. So, The Guardian showed one of these articles, from The Daily Mail, to some publishers and editors at various important newspapers, and printed their responses.

Yes, there's a lot of two-faced stuff, here. Papers like the New York Times, which regularly flacks for the US government, for example. But it's fair to say that all these media owners and editors at least understand the principle that's at stake when politicians defend secrecy and lies.

10 October 2013 | The Guardian
On Thursday the Daily Mail described the Guardian as 'The paper that helps Britain's enemies'. We showed that article to many of the world's leading editors. This is what they said:

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Grim report on press freedoms under Obama

Zoë Carpenter | The Nation | 10 Oct 2013

What sets the Obama administration apart from others, said Downie, is not its attempt to control the media narrative but rather its ability to do so. “What’s significant here is the very sophisticated, very successful, very determined way they’ve gone about doing this,” Downie told The Nation. “Most administrations aren’t very successful. This one has been very tightly disciplined.”

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Republican governors and Medican't | The Daily Show

10 Oct 2013 | Health-challenged states like Texas and Mississippi refuse to take advantage of a federally subsidized Medicaid expansion.

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Bill Moyers essay: On the sabotage of democracy

4 Oct 2013 | BillMoyers.com

Once upon a time when I was a young man working on Capitol Hill, it was commonplace that when a bill became law, everybody was unhappy with it. But you didn’t bring down the government just because it wasn’t perfect. You argue and fight and vote and then, due process having been at least raggedly served - on to the next fight." - Bill Moyers

RNC chairman can't answer simple question of what do Republicans want

3 Oct 2013 | MSNBC.com

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