Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes Wall Street Vampires:
Last year the vampires of finance bought themselves a Congress. I know it’s not nice to call them that, but I have my reasons, which I’ll explain in a bit. For now, however, let’s just note that these days Wall Street, which used to split its support between the parties, overwhelmingly favors the G.O.P. And the Republicans who came to power this year are returning the favor by trying to kill Dodd-Frank, the financial reform enacted in 2010.
And why must Dodd-Frank die? Because it’s working.
This statement may surprise progressives who believe that nothing significant has been done to rein in runaway bankers. And it’s true both that reform fell well short of what we really should have done and that it hasn’t yielded obvious, measurable triumphs like the gains in insurance thanks to Obamacare. [...]
O.K., why do I call them that? Not because they drain the economy of its lifeblood, although they do: there’s a lot of evidence that oversize, overpaid financial industries — like ours — hurt economic growth and stability. Even the International Monetary Fund agrees.
But what really makes the word apt in this context is that the enemies of reform can’t withstand sunlight.
Anne Applebaum at
The Washington Post writes
The End of Britain as we know it:
This election will be remembered as the one that rescued the career of David Cameron, the British prime minister, who was publicly contemplating his own exit from politics only two months ago. It will also be remembered as the election that abruptly ended the career of the Labor Party leader, Ed Miliband, who had confidently carved his electoral promises onto a large piece of limestone only last week. Above all, it will be remembered as the election that every single major pollster got wrong: All the dire talk of hung parliaments, minority coalitions and the intervention, even, of the queen has vanished with the emergence of a solid Conservative majority. But long after these various dramas are forgotten, it might also be remembered as the election that marked the beginning of the end of Great Britain, at least in the form that we now know it.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at
The Washington Post writes about
David Cameron’s wizardry, electoral, that is. His governing wizardry is another matter altogether:
That the two big parties could not even manage 70 percent of the vote between them is one sign of Britain’s political distemper. Another is the electoral revolution in Scotland.
Labor’s roots run deep north of the River Tweed. Scotland was always its bastion. Not this time. By giving the SNP all but three of Scotland’s 59 seats—Labor held 41 of them before the election—its voters signaled not only their frustration that Miliband’s party had taken them for granted over many years but also that they were fed up with London politicians altogether. [...]
David Cameron has proven himself an electoral wizard. Now he’ll have to reveal a good deal more about what’s behind the curtain.
More pundit excerpts can be read below the fold.
Doyle McManus at the Los Angeles Times writes Does Congress know we're at war?:
When President Obama announced nine months ago that the United States was going to war against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Congress reached an unusual near-consensus on two big points: Entering the fight was a good idea, but it was also important that the legislative branch formally authorize the campaign. [...]
Only that hasn't happened. War authorization proposals have stalled in both the Senate and the House, and proponents are close to abandoning hope that Congress will ever hold a vote. [...]
So while Congress' paralysis might appear at first glance a simple problem of partisan divide—most Republicans want to give the president free rein, most Democrats want to restrict him—the true picture is more complicated and more subtle.
"This would be easier to do if one party were strongly on one side and the other lined up on the opposite side," [Rep. Adam] Schiff [D-CA] said. "But it divides both parties, and so neither sees a real political advantage in it."
Dexter Thomas at
The Guardian urges readers to
Don’t unfriend your racist Facebook friends. Teach them:
Perhaps you’re like me, and the first thing you do every morning is to check social media. And perhaps on a recent morning, you opened your Facebook app only to see your old high school buddy Stacey post this:
“Why don’t we just send the US Marines to Baltimore City and clean house?! We don’t need these animals around us anyway!”. It was posted an hour ago, and already has 107 likes. You scroll down a bit further down the thread. One of her friends chimes in: “I’m down! As a Marine veteran, I’d love to smoke some of them animals!”. 46 likes on this one.
I’m gonna delete this jerk, you think. You don’t need this negativity, especially not this early in the morning. It doesn’t matter if she used to share her fries with you when you ditched gym class to go to Burger King. That was then, this is now – and whatever she’s become now disgusts you. You move your cursor, hovering over the ‘unfriend’ button.
But please, don’t. Not only because she needs you (she does), but because you need her. She’s the only thing keeping you in touch with reality right now.
Andrea Plaid at
In These Times writes
Don’t ‘Arquette’ Hillary Clinton:
When Hillary Rodham Clinton announced her presidential run, I braced for an onslaught of “Arquetting.” That term, coined by organizer Irna Landrum, entails “demand[ing] support from a group based on ahistorical narratives about civil rights,” and was inspired by Patricia Arquette’s misguided pitch for wage equity at this year’s Oscars: “It’s time for all the women in America and all the men that love women, and all the gay people, and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.”
Whatever she intended, Arquette’s comments perpetuated a conflict between white feminists and feminists of color over the meaning of gender equality that dates to at least 1851, when Sojourner Truth gave her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, countering white feminists’ insistence that suffrage and abolitionism were separate causes. More than a century later, the black feminists of the Combahee River Collective expressed their “disillusionment” with both the “elitism” of the feminist movement and the sexism of the civil rights and Black Power movements. And the term “reproductive justice” was coined in 1994 because feminists of color felt that the “pro-choice” framework focused too narrowly on individual access to birth control and abortion while ignoring structural inequities, like poverty, that limit women’s reproductive options.
These are examples of the need for intersectional feminism: a struggle for equality that goes beyond just considering “gender” and “women” to other complicating factors, such as class and race.
Clinton’s 2008 campaign, however, was short on intersectionality and long on Arquetting. Her husband, Bill, accused then-candidate Barack Obama’s campaign of “playing the race card” to undercut African-American support for Clinton. Feminist icons Gloria Steinem and Geraldine Ferraro asserted that Clinton’s gender was a bigger disadvantage than Obama’s race. It all left an indelibly bad memory, and I braced myself for more of the same this time.
Bob Lord at
Other Words writes
Coddling the Rich:
Question: How much did Congress save taxpayers last year when it cut food stamp benefits for 16 million poor children?
Answer: Less than the windfall Congress is trying to bestow on a few of the richest American families by ending the federal estate tax. The House has already approved a bill to do this, and the Senate is poised to follow suit.
To get a sense of just how breathtaking this giveaway is, consider the $30 billion estate of casino magnate — and GOP super-donor — Sheldon Adelson.
If the repeal goes through, the Adelson family’s savings, when added to what they’ve already avoided through loopholes, could total as much as $12 billion. That’s far more than the $8.6 billion Congress sought to spare taxpayers over a decade by cutting food stamps last year.
Aaron M. Renn at the
Los Angeles Times writes
The inconsistent Libertarians of Convenience:
Something curious is happening in cities across the country. Urban progressives are finding their goals stymied by laws and regulations, and they're demanding less government interference—but very selectively. Call them Libertarians of Convenience. [...]
These inconsistencies seem to reflect elite biases. The things that liberal-minded city residents like and want to do—eat from hip food trucks, smoke dope and other “bourgeois bohemian” pursuits—should be left as free as possible, consequences be damned. Those that they consider declasse—Big Gulps, cigarettes, Wal-Mart—should be restricted or even shut down. It's regulation for thee but not for me.
Libertarians of Convenience may argue that there's no real contradiction here, that they have no problem with regulation in theory, just with stupid regulation; that they only favor laws regulating genuinely harmful activities, and liberalization in all other cases. But that claim doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Emily Schwartz Greco at
Other Words writes
Converting the Fossil-Fuel Fundamentalists:
Kicking humanity’s addiction to oil, gas, and coal before those industries render the planet uninhabitable may take a miracle. So it’s a good thing that the climate movement found a patron saint.
I’m talking about Pope Francis, of course. Before an upcoming encyclical makes the Vatican’s stance official, he’s already spreading the gospel of a fossil-free future. [...]
Two years into what he says will be a brief tenure, the pope’s putting climate skeptics on the defensive.
Fretting about the fate of the Earth is part of his broader condemnation of the global status quo, which Francis considers to be a “throwaway culture.” And it explains why he and some of his top aides came to call for a transition to greener energy.
Chris Hedges at
Truth Dig writes
A Nation of Snitches:
A totalitarian state is only as strong as its informants. And the United States has a lot of them. They read our emails. They listen to, download and store our phone calls. They photograph us on street corners, on subway platforms, in stores, on highways and in public and private buildings. They track us through our electronic devices. They infiltrate our organizations. They entice and facilitate “acts of terrorism” by Muslims, radical environmentalists, activists and Black Bloc anarchists, framing these hapless dissidents and sending them off to prison for years. They have amassed detailed profiles of our habits, our tastes, our peculiar proclivities, our medical and financial records, our sexual orientations, our employment histories, our shopping habits and our criminal records. They store this information in government computers. It sits there, waiting like a time bomb, for the moment when the state decides to criminalize us.
Totalitarian states record even the most banal of our activities so that when it comes time to lock us up they can invest these activities with subversive or criminal intent. And citizens who know, because of the courage of Edward Snowden, that they are being watched but naively believe they “have done nothing wrong” do not grasp this dark and terrifying logic.
Tyranny is always welded together by subterranean networks of informants. These informants keep a populace in a state of fear. They perpetuate constant anxiety and enforce isolation through distrust. The state uses wholesale surveillance and spying to break down trust and deny us the privacy to think and speak freely.