Posted inPolitics: National

Why tax cuts won’t stim this time

At the moment, tax cuts make up 42 percent of the so-called stimulus bill. This dooms it to be ineffectual, if not actually making things worse. The latter will happen because this is all borrowed money. Public investments provide the means to repay it by improving commerce and productivity. Tax cuts just piss it away. Where are the fighting liberals who are going to filibuster this mess and make the president realize his bipartisanship dance has only reinvigorated the Republicans, the party that wrecked America?

In 2003, Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman laid out the exhaustive case against the cult of tax cuts, in a must-read, must-keep article in the New York Times Magazine. Yet this remains the only idea of the GOP, the party that wrecked America. And it has been given center stage by a naive president and weak Democrats who don't know how to act as winners. As a consequence, public investments in infrastructure, the best way to generate jobs and a return for the future, have been pared back. The perfect should not be the enemy of the good. But this is a rotten bill, and it is the enemy of the good, whether the punked good has realized yet or not.

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Posted inPolitics: National

When presidents had class

In 1901, President William McKinley was attending the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo when an anarchist stepped forward and shot him, a mortal wound. As the crowd fell upon the assassin,…
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Posted inPolitics: National

Can Americans be swayed by real issues?

Air America’s Tom Hartmann had a fascinating take on the McCain-Rove attack commercials, especially the ad that calls Obama "the One." While critics like David Gergen say they are code for uppity, designed to get out the racist vote, Hartmann said "the One" ad is code for end-time evangelicals.

A small group? They bought 68 million copies of the Left Behind series. The code of the highly misleading ads is that Obama is the Antichrist. These "communities of interest" are big enough to tip an election — or make it close enough to steal — especially when the corporate media continue to give McCain a free ride on the issues.

Obama may be running a very smart campaign: refusing to get in the gutter, showing a willingness to compromise on drilling if it also wins support for alternative energy and accountability for the oil companies. But enough Americans may be too addled, too addicted to promises of instant gratification, too ignorant to pay attention. Does that mean it’s foolish to hammer McCain on the issues? Not at all.

Here’s a partial list of what Obama and Democrats should be relentlessly pushing:   

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Posted inPolitics: National

The mess we’re in

The FDIC, one of those "liberal" "socialist" things foisted on free-market America by Franklin Roosevelt, had to step in Friday to avoid a major bank run. More failures are expected and — dirty little secret — only about $2.5 trillion of the $7 trillion deposited in U.S. banks are actually federally insured.

Seven trillion sounds like a lot. But Americans are in hock to $12 trillion in mortgage debt as housing prices have collapsed, the last big factory of America (making houses) has all but shut down, and foreclosures are reaching records. The Iraq war will cost another $3 trillion. The U.S. national debt is $10 trillion (nearly double from 2001). That ought to tell you something about the mess we’re in.

What’s being little reported about the seizure of IndyMac "Bank" is that the institution is a bastard child of Countrywide, Angelo Mozilo’s death star of subprime calamity (now a boulder around the neck of Bank of America). IndyMac was spun off because it was collatoralizing mortgages too big to be sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, now on federal life support. The bubble was so huge, fed by so much fraud and bad policy, that the barons had to find "innovative" ways to keep it going.  And all that time, the regulators waved it on. This is the mess we’re in.

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Posted inPolitics: National

American foreign policy, shackled

In the ever-desperate effort to keep you distracted, the corporate media are forced to scrape quite deep today, telling you that the husband of an obscure senator had sex with a prostitute in a Troy, Mich, motel. What on earth don’t they want you to know?

Things like the erosion of American latitude in foreign policy — some might even call it sovereignty. And it’s all our doing, whether through our thoughtless votes at the ballot box or our votes in what we buy and how we live.

We’re supposedly committed to a war on terror, or a struggle against "Islamic fascism," to use the "conservative" phrase. But who is the biggest sponsor of terror? Our friends, the Saudis. This news comes not from some conspiracy site but from the Bush Treasury department, which reported quietly that Saudi Arabia remains the largest funder of al Qaeda and other extremists.

Meanwhile, nations are talking about boycotting the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics to protest China’s horrendous human rights record. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel apparently will not be there. You can bet President Bush, the leader of the Free World and a man who pledged to support democracy across the globe, will attend.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Blond coed hooker admiral stands up against war with Iran

If only Admiral William Fallon had been involved with a $5,500 call girl named Kristen, or maybe had murdered a blond coed…

I don’t say this to libel this honorable man, but only to make the point about what it might take to get the attention of the addled, coddled, willfully ignorant American people about the really important things that are happening in the world. These thing will affect them far more than the hookers or coeds, or the "local news" that dominates their corporate-owned newspapers.

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Posted inPolitics: National

An America that tortures, and other nightmares

We have more than a recession. The bottom has fallen out.

We debate whether the United States should torture prisoners. We debate it and the “in favor” argument wins. Not once, but again and again, for years now.

At the birth of the Republic, Gen. Washington forbade the mistreatment of British and Hessian prisoners of war. He hoped we would indeed inaugurate “novus ordo seclorum,” a new order of the ages. Because the Founders knew they were establishing a republic of men and not angels, they set this new order on a firm foundation of the law, particularly a Constitution based on separation of powers and, especially, checks and balances against the excesses of the executive. It wasn’t just that the Founders had rebelled against a king; they took their cues from ancient Rome, and knew how an emperor could use constant war as an instrument to destroy peoples’ liberties.

Constant war and torture.

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