Go read these letters from interested corporations. Some of them are really chilling, especially the grocery manufacturers who are more than a little pissed at the regulations against certain ingredients with which they’re already free to poison Americans!
Category: Politics As Usual
Popular
Krugman on whether Obama will keep talking about inequality:
All indications are that President Obama will make inequality the central theme of his State of the Union address. Assuming he does, he will face two different kinds of sniping. One will come from the usual suspects on the right, shrieking “class warfare”. The other will come from a variety of people, some of them well-intentioned, arguing that while sure, inequality is an issue, the crucial thing now is to get the economy growing and create more jobs; these people will argue that populism is a diversion from the main issue.
Here’s why they’re wrong.
First of all, even on the straight economics inequality and job creation aren’t completely separable issues. There’s a decent though not ironclad case that rising inequality helped set the stage for economic crisis, and may be holding back recovery; there’s an even stronger case that weak employment is depressing wages and increasing inequality. So Obama can and one hopes will treat inequality-and-jobs as a single theme, and do so with a clear intellectual conscience.
Beyond that, there’s the political economy.
It has been painfully obvious, to anyone willing to see (a group that unfortunately doesn’t include a large part of the press corps) that deficit obsession hasn’t really been about deficits — it has been about using deficits as a club with which to smash to welfare state, and hence increase inequality. Even the supposedly nonpartisan players have this remarkable habit of including “reducing marginal tax rates” as a key goal of deficit reduction strategies, which is a dead giveaway to what it’s really about.
Conversely, talking about the need to help struggling families is also a way to shift the focus away from deficit obsession, and pave the way at least for a relaxation of austerity, if not actual stimulus.
And I think we also have to face up to an awkward political reality: moderate populism has a broad popular constituency, Keynesian macroeconomics doesn’t.
On the first point, recent Gallup polling shows that most Americans are class warriors, at least in a mild sense:
Go read the rest!
The lost legacy of Otis Pike
I’d completely forgotten about him. He just died Monday:
The Pike Committee also recommended the creation of a statutory Inspector General for the intelligence community, but this proposal was considered too radical at the time. In the wake of the Iran-Contra disaster, the idea of a statutory IG was revived, but CIA Director William Webster was opposed because he believed that such an office would interfere with operational activities. Senate intelligence Committee Chairman David Boren, D-Oklahoma, also was opposed because he thought the office of an IG would be a rival to his committee. Fortunately, two key members of the intelligence committee, John Glenn, D-Ohio, and Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, believed that a statutory IG was essential, and Boren had to give in.
The CIA’s Office of the IG operated effectively until recently, when the Obama administration inexplicably moved to weaken the IGs throughout the intelligence community, particularly in the CIA. The current chairman of the congressional intelligence committees, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, and Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Michigan, apparently do not understand the importance of a fully engaged IG to their own efforts to conduct genuine oversight.
The Pike Committee understood that CIA’s role in the FBI’s counterintelligence programs (COINTELPRO) was particularly intolerable in a democratic society, and that the political operations conducted by the CIA were in violation of its charter, which prohibited the Agency from conducting domestic operations.
The programs that CIA Director Richard Helms had denied not only existed, but they were extensive and illegal. President Gerald Ford’s senior advisers, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, encouraged the President to established the Rockefeller Commission to examine the CIA in an attempt to derail both the Church and Pike Commissions and thus obfuscate many of the efforts to disrupt the lawful activities of Americans advocating social change from 1956 to 1971.
Unfortunately, little of the Pike Committee’s work in these areas was known to the public because most of its hearings were closed and its final report was ultimately suppressed. Today, the NSA is conducting domestic surveillance in violation of its charter with no serious response from the chairmen of the intelligence committees.
Continue reading “The lost legacy of Otis Pike”
The light finally dawns
Talk about running to the front of the parade:
GOProud co-founder Jimmy LaSalvia announced last week that he would renounce his affiliation with the Republican Party and become an independent nearly five years after he founded the group aimed at gay conservatives.
“I just came to the realization that the Republican Party doesn’t represent my principles and values,” LaSalvia told POLITICO. “I’m a small government conservative and they’re for big government. They’re happy to have big government as long as they’re in charge, More importantly, I don’t tolerate bigotry of any kind, whether it’s anti-gay bigotry, anti-Muslim bigotry. And they do and that’s just not OK with me.”
Although LaSalvia has spent the time since co-founding GOProud in 2009 working within the Republican Party to focus on the issues he cares most passionately about, he says he’s given up hope.
“I think there’s a cultural problem within the Republican Party that’s beyond fixing. I think the leadership of the Republican Party is so out of touch with life in America today that I just decided that it’s not worth fixing. I don’t think they can win a national election again. Pull the plug on the patient, the party’s brain dead.”
For LaSalvia, the eye-opening moment came during Mitt Romney’s presidential run in 2012.
“He was so paralyzed by fear of retribution from the forces of intolerance that he couldn’t do what he needed to do to reach out,” said LaSalvia. “He admitted himself that they wrote off 47 percent of the country.”
Punishing us for protesting
Yes, this is England. But it will happen here:
Chief constables are shortly to press the home secretary, Theresa May, to authorise the use of water cannon by any police force across England and Wales to deal with anticipated street protests.
The Association of Chief Police Officers says that the need to control continued protests “from ongoing and potential future austerity measures” justifies the introduction of water cannon across Britain for the first time.
The London mayor, Boris Johnson, has already announced a consultation on the introduction of water cannon onto the streets of London ready for use by this summer.
Ballad of El Goodo
Big Star:
Another Christie excuse shot down
This image, captured from the video of a New Jersey Public Television program, “Superstorm Sandy: A Live Town Hall,” which aired May 16, 2013, shows Hoboken, N.J. Mayor Dawn Zimmer seated in the front row between Belmar, N.J. Mayor Matt Doherty, right, and DCA Commissioner Richard Constable, left.We talked earlier about Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer (D), who told MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki over the weekend that two top officials in Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) administration told her to advance a local development deal, and in exchange, her city would receive more post-Sandy relief funding. The governor’s office is challenging the mayor’s story this afternoon with an easy-to-check claim.
At issue is an event in May of last year, when a group of officials gathered for a public television special on Sandy recovery. Zimmer sat alongside Richard Constable, Christie’s community affairs commissioner, and according to the mayor, Constable told her if she moved forward with a specific development deal, “they money would start flowing” to Hoboken.
Today, Christie’s office disseminated a piece from the Asbury Park Press, quoting Belmar Mayor Matt Doherty (D), who was part of the same panel.
Belmar Mayor Matt Doherty, who also was a panelist, said he didn’t hear a conversation between Zimmer and Constable.
“I sat next to Mayor Zimmer and, if I recall correctly, (Constable) was on my other side,” Doherty said.
If true, that would be a pretty important detail – Zimmer’s version of events makes clear that she was sitting next to the Christie administration official. But is Doherty’s memory accurate?
It is not. As is clear in the above photo, Doherty’s mistaken. Seated in the front row, from right to left, is Doherty, then Zimmer, then Constable. Patrick Murray, the director of Monmouth University’s polling institute, is on the far-left side of that front row.
It’s not surprising that the governor’s office hopes to undermine the accuracy of the mayor’s claims, but in this case, her version is at least plausible – she was seated next to Constable, just as she claimed. Doherty’s account, which Team Christie is circulating, is simply mistaken.
Beyond Vietnam: A time to break the silence
There’s a reason why Martin Luther King Jr., the great man whose birthday we celebrate today, was such a threat to the establishment. Not because of the soft-and-fuzzy, non-threatening MLK the media so loves, cherry-picking his legacy to leave only the pacifism, but because of his radical views on social and economic justice. (As he said, “I take the gospel seriously.”)
It saddens me that so many young people seem to have no real understanding of who he was, or why he was so revolutionary. To them, it’s just a day off from school, or a day taking part in public service. But why? And why do so many political pretenders claim his legacy while shunning the hard work of justice? Only the Occupy movement echoes the same moral voice as King’s.
“Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break The Silence” might be the greatest speech of our generation. I can think of nothing that comes close.
Dr. King attacked the military-industrial complex, calling the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He said war was the enemy of the poor. He was right then. Sadly, he still is.
If you listen to the entire speech, you’ll see how very little has changed since he made it.
Continue reading “Beyond Vietnam: A time to break the silence”
‘Flies on the wall’
That’s what we are to the kind of people supporting Christie and Rick Scott:
Mr. Christie shunned public appearances in Florida, where he is raising money for Gov. Rick Scott, a fellow Republican.
Instead, the New Jersey governor was whisked into an event at the Country Club of Orlando, and, later, a fund-raiser at a Palm Beach home owned by the heir to a sugar fortune.
Inside, Mr. Christie found what must pass, at this difficult moment, as an oasis for him: a group of Ferrari and Jaguar-driving Florida Republicans for whom traffic in New Jersey is a distant thought.
Getting into his Bentley after the fund-raiser, one guest, Geoffrey Leigh, called the controversy over the lane closures “little flies on the wall, quite frankly.”
You know what I think about people driving those cars: They’ll be the easiest to pick off when the revolution comes!
Omerta
The Times has a look at the inside of Christie’s inner circle, and the article included this paragraph:
Party leaders are urging the governor to let go of a trademark Christie trait: his fierce loyalty to old friends and high school classmates who have risen with him in state government. It is time, they counsel, for him to recruit a more nationally savvy political team that can take him beyond Trenton to Washington. Fueling such concerns, new allegations arose on Saturday that top Christie aides had used Hurricane Sandy recovery money as a political weapon against the Democratic mayor of Hoboken, N.J.
I don’t think these high-level Republicans understand what they’re dealing with. He surrounds himself with loyalists because he can trust them to keep their mouths shut about his dirty deals — just like they do in the Mafia. Who knows? By the time we’re done, we may find some slight overlap.