TODAY'S TOPICS: My Article, Endless War, Libya, Stewart v. Fox/PolitiFact, Olbermann, Cost Cutting v. Shifting, Perry
Some great news to report. My Patriot Act article was published by two of the most widely read news sites in the country (as well as linked ALL OVER the net), Common Dreams.org (where my article is sandwiched between Chris Hedges and Robert Kuttner...and was on their home page for two days) and Alternet.org (still on their home page). You can check it out here and here.
Endless War and Obama Lawlessness
What can I say? Another President, another lawless warmonger. I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise to any of us. After all, we’ve been bombing other countries illegally, while being lied about it, for decades without cease now.
Forgive me if I role my eyes when Obama’s big “withdrawal” plan only takes out less than HALF as many soldiers as he’s added by late 2012. So, the war is ending because a year from now we’ll STILL tens of thousands more troops there as we did during the Bush years? Some withdrawal...
By the way, a new pew survey finds that a record high level of Americans now support an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops. In the survey, 56% of respondents said they thought troops should come home "as soon as possible." At the same time, 39% said the military should remain until the situation in Afghanistan has stabilized, a record low in Pew's surveys.
So for all those Obama apologists, looking to justify each and every crime he commits or lie he tells, save me the “he’s got to do it to win the election” bullshit.
Of course, on his side is the typical, concerted media campaign in favor of invasion, occupation, and death. Now of course, which will be detailed by Glenn Greenwald in the article section today, we have a new war in Libya, being waged illegally by the President, who, as Bush did before, secretly overruled his OWN LAWYERS regarding the legality of it. Even more ironic, is GOP members in Congress urging withdrawal….making the whole sordid tale that much more sick, twisted, and hypocritical (from all sides).
In addition to recent revelations that were now murdering Libyan civilians, nine years later, on the first Monday of this month, it was reported that five American soldiers were killed in Iraq, the worst one-day casualty total in two years. On the same day, gunmen and suicide bombers killed 21 people and wounded many more. In Tikrit, a suicide bomber killed 12 people. Over the three days before, a mosque and a hospital were both bombed, killing 19 people. Within a week, three more American troops were killed.
So let’s all remember, that as the President and the GOP (and some Democrats) talk about the need to “tighten our belts”, and cut core public programs that help human beings, we’re spending billions on killing people who did NOTHING to us in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya…with NO END in sight…
Supreme Court Fascist Majority Strikes Again!
I’m sure everyone is aware of the latest Supreme Court decision that strikes at the heart of peoples rights to take on corporate criminals. This time, it was their outright rejection of a class action suit (which are now essentially banned) filed by all the women that have been discriminated against by Walmart.
Here’s a few facts: "Women fill 70 percent of the hourly jobs in the retailer's stores but make up only 33 percent of management employees," and that "the plaintiffs' 'largely uncontested descriptive statistics' also show that women working in the company's stores 'are paid less than men in every region' and 'that the salary gap widens over time even for men and women hired into the same jobs at the same time."
The Budget and Corporate America
Once again, a factoid I wanted to share highlighting where ALL THE MONEY really is: "According to a new report called 'S.& P. 500 Executive Pay: Bigger Than ...Whatever You Think It Is,' put together by the independent research firm R. G. Associates, there are currently 32 companies that actually spent more on compensation for their top executives in 2010 than they paid in corporate income taxes: 'Total executive pay increased by 13.9 percent in 2010 among the 483 companies where data was available for the analysis. The total pay for those companies' 2,591 named executives, before taxes, was $14.3 billion ...Warming to his subject, Mr. Ciesielski also determined that 158 companies paid more in cash compensation to their top guys and gals last year than they paid in audit fees to their accounting firms. Thirty-two companies paid their top executives more in 2010 than they paid in cash income taxes."
Now, add that fact with what the CBO numbers just released demonstrate…and that’s we DON’T NEED to cut programs or punish people if we don’t want to…
Ezra Klein:
Ezra Klein:
The Congressional Budget Office just released the latest edition of its long-term budget outlook (pdf), and it shows the same thing as always: If Congress lets the Bush tax cuts expire or offsets their extension, implements the Affordable Care Act as scheduled and makes or offset the Medicare cuts prescribed by the 1997 Balanced Budget Act — which CBO
As Digby notes, “In other words there is no long term debt crisis unless the politicians decide to create one. Everything's already in place to keep it perfectly under control. So why are we talking about it? I don't think there's any better evidence that this deficit fever is nothing more than a disaster capitalist boondoggle. The wealthy elites and their nihilist ideologue allies in both parties are flogging this debt crisis in order to enact favorable legislation and fill out their long term wish list. That they are doing it under a Democratic administration just makes it sweeter.”
Pension "Crisis" Lies…
Another one of the talking points you’ll hear echoing throughout the media landscape is that pensions are a trillion, to 2 trillion bucks in the hole…and must be reined in at all costs by cutting benefits and lowering wages (i.e. making employees pay a higher percentage of salary into pensions).
Of course, what this trillion figure leaves out is over what period of time? And is that figure correct in the first place? Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research wrote a great paper explaining the origins of the “pension crisis” - which is rooted mostly the housing bubble - and that the estimates of one or two trillion dollars were misleading in at least two ways: Such figures might not fully account for a recovery in stock prices (which would improve the outlook for pension funds, and thus reduce the funding gap), and expressing funding gaps as a dollar figure absent any context is rather useless.
Express the gap as a share of the economy, and things aren't so alarming. As Baker wrote:
The size of the projected state and local government shortfalls measured as a share of future gross state products appear manageable. The total shortfall for the pension funds is less than 0.2 percent of projected gross state product over the next 30 years for most states. Even in the cases of the states with the largest shortfalls, the gap is less than 0.5 percent of projected state product.
The media have been repeating tales circulated by right-wing and business organizations who are attacking public-sector workers and public-sector unions. In fact, the vast majority of public-sector workers do not retiree in their early 50s and do not enjoy especially generous benefits....
If the media had been doing a competent job reporting on this issue, legislators would be hearing tales of 70-year old retirees trying to get by on less than $20,000 a year. (Roughly 30 percent of public sector employees do not get Social Security.)
Cost-Shifting Is Not Cost-Cutting
I really want to go back to the whole privatization debate…and the idea that cutting Medicaid or Medicare somehow cuts costs or reduces spending...because it doesn't...it simply cost shifts…and in the worst kinds of ways because you’re actually INCREASING costs, but on the backs of seniors and the poor…and worse, the money will go straight to corporate interests rather than the government.
For instance, the CBO estimates that the Republican budget's $771 billion in Medicaid cuts over ten years amounts to a 35% cut in Medicaid funding to states. The transformation of Medicaid into a block grant program, ensures that funding will decline because the Republican budget increases these grants annually at the rate of inflation, adjusted for population growth — not the rate of inflation for health care, which is far above the general inflation rate.
In other words, it's built into the budget that states won't be able to keep up with the costs of the program under the Republican budget, because the Republican budget doesn't take the rate of growth in health care costs into consideration. So, states cut back on the very Medicaid services that the elderly and disabled, and their families, rely upon.
The GOP budget cuts a total $2.17 trillion from Medicaid and related health care programs — $771 billion in Medicaid cuts, plus $1.4 trillion from nixing the Medicaid expansion in health care reform — Some of it by eliminating health care coverage for at least 32 million people, and some through drastic cuts in nursing home care coverage.
As for Medicare, if you REALLY want to lower costs, instead of making seniors pay over $6,000 more per year for vouchers to subsidize private health insurance, we could just expand Medicare by eliminating the Republican price-fixing scheme that forbids the government from negotiating drug prices with the drug companies.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University projects that eliminating the one sentence in the Bush Medicare Part D prescription drug plan that allows the drug companies to set their own prices will save the taxpayers—and Medicare—one trillion dollars over the next ten years!
So rather than big oil paying their fair share of taxes, or Wall Street paying something, ANYTHING, for their crimes and casino, or the rich paying what they did in taxes just 10 years ago (we actually should go back before Reagan), we are looking (and Obama has signaled he supports) to give MORE tax breaks for corporations while cutting core services to the middle class and poor.
My point again is to demonstrate the ABSURDITY that any of the GOP proposals actually reins in spending...it increases spending by PEOPLE...while hurting the economy and killing Americans. If we wanted to actually cut costs, there's all kinds of ways to do that...but those ways take a tiny bit off the corporate bottom line, and that's why we can't enact them.
GOP Budget: Starve Poor Americans
Here's another doozie the GOP is fighting for by holding the debt ceiling hostage (i.e. terrorism). Their spending bill would take food away from about 350,000 women and children. Remember, this is at the same time they fought and won to keep oil industry tax welfare and seek to ELIMINATE the estate tax that's leveled on the richest .2% of Americans.
More than 5 million American seniors face the threat of hunger and 1 million a year go hungry, according to a report released today by Sen. Bernie Sanders. WE also know that poor nutrition can cause chronic diseases that require costly hospital or nursing home care, thus INCREASING costs over time…so we lose money AND worsen public health by cutting such programs.
As Sanders notes, "Investing in senior nutrition and in well-designed senior programs in general saves money for the government because when we do that we keep people out of emergency rooms, nursing homes and the hospital. The result is substantial savings for government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid."
A few more factoids: The average cost of a meal delivered to a senior's home is about $5. A one-day hospital stay typically costs about $1,800. The cost of a year in a nursing home is $77,000. Clearly, an up-front investment in programs like Meals On Wheels and community meals at senior centers is a more common-sense approach to our budget crisis. Of course, we live in the age of unreason....so Obama looks more than ready to allow people to starve while giving tax cuts to businesses. What a disgrace.
Why not, by the least, make this a major campaign issue? Why not do a press conference demonstrating your outrage at GOP tactics? Instead, Obama secretly is negotiating all this stuff away just so that mean ole GOP won't crash the economy. Talk about a lose, lose, lose scenario. We lose critical funding for programs, we lose the debate because there isn't one, and we once again empower the GOP to use such extortion again.
I will point out that FINALLY, Democrats in the Senate are calling out Republicans for DELIBERATELY crashing the economy to win next year. Of course, the President is missing in action...AS ALWAYS.
I will point out that FINALLY, Democrats in the Senate are calling out Republicans for DELIBERATELY crashing the economy to win next year. Of course, the President is missing in action...AS ALWAYS.
VIDEO SECTION
Before I show some of the interview, or debate really, between Jon Stewart and Chris Wallace, and then the subsequent Daily Show clip answering the rather ludicrous, and highly publicized statement by Politifact, let me provide a little factual backstory. When Stewart pointed out that Fox viewers are the most misinformed on political issues, he was ABSOLUTELY correct. The only mistake he made was saying that “every” study indicates this.
So, as one would expect from PolitiFact (FYI…this is one of those false equivalency groups that claim to be non-partisan yet have a disturbing trend of what they choose to fact check and then how the rate the “lie” or “truth”) honed in on the “every”, and then provided a bunch of rather meaningless studies showing that Fox viewers weren’t always dead last…so Stewart was wrong (in fact, on yahoo home page for all day yesterday the headline was politifact “shreds” stewart).
The fact is, regularly Politifact let’s large and OUTRAGEOUS lies go unchallenged when it comes from a Republican but focus on a small rhetorical flourish when it comes from a Democrat to pounce on them and declare their statement false.
And this trend was on display again. Yes, Stewart shouldn’t have said “every”, but, it was a rhetorical flourish used to identify a much larger truth….that being that Fox viewers ARE the most misinformed when it comes to the big political fights of the day, and that’s because Fox news DELIBERATELY misinforms them.
So let’s look at what Stewart was referring to, correctly: when it comes to politicized, contested issues where the facts have been made murky due to political biases, it is Fox viewers who are the most likely to believe incorrect things—to fall prey to misinformation. A quintessential example of such an issue is global warming, or whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction or was collaborating with Al Qaeda. There are many, many others.
AS pointed out on C&L, “To rebut Stewart’s claim, Politifact relied upon irrelevant and off-point studies. Thus, the site cited a number of Pew surveys that examine basic political literacy and relate it to what kind of media citizens consume. E.g., questions like whether people know “who the vice president is, who the president of Russia is, whether the Chief Justice is conservative, which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives and whether the U.S. has a trade deficit.”
But this is when it gets really comical. Fox, in trying to show how wrong Stewart was, sent out the results of one of their viewer polls asking, "Does this sound misinformed to you?" And unbelievably, in each case, it PROVED Stewarts point. See here:
• 91 percent believe the stimulus legislation lost jobs
• 72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit
• 72 percent believe the economy is getting worse
• 60 percent believe climate change is not occurring
In each of these cases, the OPPOSITE is true!!!
In addition, as for important studies that illustrate Stewarts point again, eight years ago, just six months into the war in Iraq, the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland found that those who relied on the Republican network were “three times more likely than the next nearest network to hold all three misperceptions — about WMD in Iraq, Saddam Hussein was involved with 9/11, and foreign support for the U.S. position on the war in Iraq.”
As Ben Armbruster noted a while back, “An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll out [in 2009] found that Fox News viewers were overwhelmingly misinformed about health care reform proposals. A 2008 Pew study ranked Fox News last in the number of ‘high knowledge’ viewers and a 2007 Pew poll ranked Fox viewers as the least knowledgeable about national and international affairs.”
The reason I go into all this is it’s a fascinating example of how FACT CHECKING organizations fall prey to the same biases and ignorance as all the rest...and the way we use a word here and there can be used against us to cloud the truth.
Now, watch the rather surreal debate (of course, this is edited by Fox) between Stewart and Wallace…and the rather insane efforts by Wallace to compare Fox with Comedy Central…don’t ask…friggin bizarre:
And now watch Stewarts BRILLIANT expose of Fox in answering PolitiFact:
Since it appears yet another intellectually challenged sociopath Governor from Texas might run for President (Perry), and would likely be the GOP favorite along with Romney, let me debunk the CONTINUOUSLY repeated myth in the corporate media and by all Republicans that his economic record in Texas is something to tout…even going so far as to call it the “Texas Miracle” (which pushes the very boundaries of time and space).
As Joshua Holland notes, “he did slash taxes to the bone, handing out credits to his political cronies like they were candy. He decried the evils of Big Government while hypocritically using federal stimulus funds to help close Texas' budget gap in the short term, and now he's using the state's longer term fiscal disaster – one of his own creation – as a premise for destroying an already threadbare social safety net serving the neediest Texans. As a result of these policies, plus immigration and other external factors, his state's added a lot of low-paying poverty jobs without decent benefits." He's added very little in the way of “prosperity.”
And, as Jim Hightower notes, "First, while the Texas unemployment rate of 8 percent (and going up while national average went down) is 1 percent lower than the national rate, 23 other states are doing even better -- including New York. Also, his self-touted record of job growth is essentially the same as Democratic Gov. Ann Richards produced and far lower than what Texas had under George W.'s governorship.
Most damning, however, is that Perry-jobs are really "jobettes," offering low pay, no benefits and no upward mobility. In fact, under Rickonomics, Texas has added more minimum wage jobs than all other states combined! After 10 years in office, Gov. Perry presides over a state that has more people in poverty and more without health coverage than any other.
Meanwhile, the Miracle Man has dug Texas into one of the deepest budget holes in the country -- $27 billion short of the money needed to cover the same miserly level of state services Texans now get. Although his party controls the state Senate and has a supermajority in the House, he was unable even to get a budget passed in the regular legislative session, forcing him to convene a costly special session. His plan is to cut $4 billion and as many as 100,000 teachers from our public education system, even as school enrollment is growing exponentially.
Most damning, however, is that Perry-jobs are really "jobettes," offering low pay, no benefits and no upward mobility. In fact, under Rickonomics, Texas has added more minimum wage jobs than all other states combined! After 10 years in office, Gov. Perry presides over a state that has more people in poverty and more without health coverage than any other.
Meanwhile, the Miracle Man has dug Texas into one of the deepest budget holes in the country -- $27 billion short of the money needed to cover the same miserly level of state services Texans now get. Although his party controls the state Senate and has a supermajority in the House, he was unable even to get a budget passed in the regular legislative session, forcing him to convene a costly special session. His plan is to cut $4 billion and as many as 100,000 teachers from our public education system, even as school enrollment is growing exponentially.
Maddow has more on this grand myth:
Bernie Sanders on the Koch Brothers…
Keith Olbermann returned to the airways and gave his first but brief Special Comment on what he intends to be doing with his new show…
Olbermann interviews Michael Moore on Obama’s illegal war on Libya:
Olbermann on the latest David Vitter scandal…bribery…nice:
Lawrence O'Donnell read from some of former President Jimmy Carters' latest op-ed at the New York Times, calling for an end to America's "war on drugs."
Rep. Marcy Kaptur does it again on the House floor…maybe she could challenge Obama in the primaries!
Bill Maher dissects the mindless idiot Governor of Texas Rick Perry in New Rules:
ARTICLE SECTION
Obama rejects top lawyers' legal views on Libya, By Glenn Greenwald
A FEW CLIPS:
The growing controversy over President Obama's illegal waging of war in Libya got much bigger last night with Charlie Savage's New York Times scoop. He reveals that top administration lawyers -- Attorney General Eric Holder, OLC Chief Caroline Krass, and DoD General Counsel Jeh Johnson -- all told Obama that his latest, widely panned excuse for waging war without Congressional approval (that it does not rise to the level of "hostilities" under the War Powers Resolution (WPR)) was invalid and that such authorization was legally required after 60 days: itself a generous intepretation of the President's war powers. But Obama rejected those views and (with the support of administration lawyers in lesser positions: his White House counsel and long-time political operative Robert Bauer and State Department "legal adviser" Harold Koh) publicly claimed that the WPR does not apply to Libya.
As Savage notes, it is, in particular, "extraordinarily rare" for a President "to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice." Just imagine if George Bush had waged a war that his own Attorney General, OLC Chief, and DoD General Counsel all insisted was illegal (and did so by pointing to the fact that his White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and a legal adviser at State agreed with him).
SNIP
It should go without saying that even if the GOP had refused to support the war, that would not remotely be an excuse for violating the law and waging it without Congressional approval. Obviously, the law (and the Constitution) does not require Congressional approval for wars only where Congress favors the wars, but in all instances (it should also go without saying that a belief in the morality of this war is not an excuse for waging it illegally, any more than Bush followers' claims that warrantless eavesdropping and torture were beneficial excused their illegality). All that aside, what is undeniable is that Obama could have easily obtained Congressional approval for this war -- just as Bush could have for his warrantless eavesdropping program -- but consciously chose not to, even to the point of acting contrary to his own lawyers' conclusions about what is illegal.
Other than the same hubris -- and a desire to establish his power to act without constraints -- it's very hard to see what motivated this behavior. Whatever the motives are, it's clear that he's waging an illegal war, as his own Attorney General, OLC Chief and DoD General Counsel have told him.
9 Countries That Do It Better: Why Does Europe Take Better Care of Its People Than America?, Joshua Holland
A FEW CLIPS:
Taking Care of the Ill: France
If you have access to the best health care in the United States, then you have some of the best care in the world. But that comes with an extremely steep price, and not everyone has that kind of access.
In 2008, the U.S. spent 16 percent of its economic output on health-care and covered 85 percent of its citizens. It was the only OECD country other than Mexico and Turkey to cover less than 90 percent of its people. We have the 37th longest average life expectancy, and a recent study found that American “life expectancy has been stagnant for much of the country and is actually decreasing over much of the Southern portion of the United States.”
France, which has a health-care system ranked number one in the world by the WHO, spent 11.2 percent of its economy to cover everyone.
There are a number of drivers of health-care costs, but one statistic stands out: in the European (and European-style) economies, upwards of 70 percent of the total health-care bill is picked up by the government, meaning that people are insured in large pools with lots of bargaining clout to hold down providers' costs. In the U.S., less than half of our health care is in the public sector, resulting in a patchwork system of private insurers with much higher administrative costs. When you plug what France pays per person for health care into our own government's fiscal projections, you get balanced budgets by around 2014, which then turn into surpluses after 2040.
SNIP
Poverty: Denmark
Inequality is a measure of how much income those at the top of the pile take in compared to what those at the bottom grab. So, in countries with equal wealth, more inequality means more poverty – the piece of the economic pie shared by those at the bottom end of the scale will be smaller by definition. Not surprisingly, Denmark, at 5.4 percent, has the lowest poverty rate among the European-style countries.
The OECD uses a different standard of poverty than does the U.S. government. It counts anyone making less than half of the median income as living in poverty. By that standard, we are plagued with a poverty rate of over 17 percent, higher than all the OECD countries other than Mexico, Israel and Chile. (The average among OECD countries in general is 11.1 percent.)
Child Poverty: Denmark
One of the most tragic comparisons for America, among the richest countries in the world, is that more than one in five children live in poverty, as measured by the OECD (PDF). The OECD average is under 13 percent, and Denmark again comes in last, with childhood poverty at around 4 percent. (Following it are Finland, Norway, Austria and Sweden.)
SNIP
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board got terribly excited a few years back when a study by a right-wing think tank in Sweden “found that if Europe were part of the U.S., only tiny Luxembourg could rival the richest of the 50 American states in gross domestic product per capita.” A “rising tide still lifts all boats,” the Journal reminded us, “and U.S. GDP per capita was a whopping 32% higher than the EU average in 2000, and the gap hasn’t closed since.”
As far as the raw data go, that’s true. (But several individual European states have GDP per capita that are either higher than, or comparable to, that enjoyed in the United States.) The thing is, those data tell only part of the story about a country’s economic health. We do have different priorities, and European workers expect six to eight weeks of vacation, paid sick days, and fewer hours of overtime—Europeans simply don’t work themselves to the bone as we do. American men and women worked an average of 41 hours per week in 2005, while European men averaged 38 hours and European women only 30. As the OECD noted, “As for holiday and paid leave entitlements, the striking differences between Europe and the United States (including sickness and maternity) obviously explain some of the transatlantic gap in annual working hours.”
When you factor in the difference in time spent on the job, the income gap essentially disappears. Now, is this simply a matter of Americans’ having a superior work ethic, unblunted by the perfidy of the nanny state? Well, no. Overworked Americans are miserable. According to research cited by Boston College’s Sloan Work and Family Research Network, four in 10 workers who work a lot of extra hours say they “feel very angry toward their employers,” versus 1 percent who work only a few extra hours. Just 3 percent of two-income couples who work long hours said they were content with the effort, and nine out of 10 U.S. workers said either, “My job requires that I work very hard,” or “I never seem to have enough time to get everything done on my job.”
So, again, what we see is merely a difference in priorities.
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