Friday, October 30, 2009

Weekly Mulch: Throwing Tantrums Over Kerry-Boxer (10:14 am)

This week the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held three hearings on the Kerry-Boxer clean energy bill and, as David Roberts reports for Grist, Republican Senators had an “adolescent tantrum” about the cost of emission reductions. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Energy Information Administration (EIA) and other organizations have extensively debunked this line of debate.

Aaron Wiener agrees that the committee’s hearing was a “fairly one-sided debate” in The Washington Independent. Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) has already threatened a Republican boycott of the Committee’s markup of the Kerry-Boxer bill, which would prevent the quorum needed to do business. And on Tuesday, every Republican cut out early while Democrats discussed energy policy details with members of the Obama administration. Considering that the bill isn’t even at the markup stage, we can expect more disruptive antics from the right in weeks to come.

Republicans won’t be the only problem. Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) voiced his reservations about the bill on Tuesday. That makes his vote unlikely, as Kate Sheppard notes for Mother Jones. Baucus doesn’t want the EPA to regulate carbon emissions, and he thinks that the bill’s plan to curb emissions by 20% by 2020 is too ambitious.

Does his opinion really matter? Unfortunately, yes. Baucus is a member of Sen. Barbara Boxer’s Environment and Public Works committee, which must approve the bill before it is brought before the wider Senate. He is also the chair of the Finance Committee, meaning that he has jurisdiction over how the bill will allocate emissions permits. With a 12-7 democratic majority in the Environment and Public Works committee, legislation could move forward without Baucus, but he could still stall the bill in the Finance Committee.

“In the health care debate, Baucus delayed the bill in the Finance Committee for months, watering it down in an effort to win the support of the panel’s Republicans. In the end only one (Olympia Snowe) voted for it. Now, he’s apparently proposing a similar process for the climate bill…[and] questions whether the bill as written ‘will lead us closer to or further away’ from... read more

posted by Raquel Brown | 1 comment

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Weekly Diaspora: Legislating Hate (9:39 am)

Anti-immigration groups and pundits cling to phrases like “Illegal Alien” because they only focus on foreignness and danger. These extreme factions are all about casting immigrants as what ails our society, conjuring up demons upon which to focus national ire, and perpetuating a subhuman category of being. It’s a convenient distraction from things that are actually endangering our nation. A new web-only series from ColorLines called “Torn Apart by Deportation” is the perfect antidote to people like CNN’s Lou Dobbs.

The stories in this series are thoroughly investigated, not sensationalized, and haunting. “Torn Apart” reveals how the push against immigrants in the U.S. is, once all the pieces come together, a cultural death wish on families of color. “Torn Apart” gives faces and feelings to the results of the nation’s post-1996 immigration policies, which made it easier deport undocumented people for any criminal infraction. Two articles are currently available:

“Home in Name Only” follows Calvin James, who was deported after living in the US since the age of 12, back to Kingston, Jamaica. James is percieved as an undesirable and unwanted part of Jamaican society, which pins its crime rates on deportees. James was uprooted from a loving, productive life in the US and cast into a criminal class spanning two nations.

“Double Punishment” explores the nexus that people like James find themselves in, where they suffer under a clash of laws that target immigrants and criminals in a justice system already slanted against people of color.

Wiretap tackles the issue of the upcoming census count slated for Spring 2010. The census has become a point of political contention and moved abruptly away from its very practical purpose of counting all people in the country. Senators David Vitter (R-LA) and Robert Bennett (R-UT) are trying to add an amendment to an appropriations bill that would include a question about citizenship status to the census form, disrupting the entire well-established process of the census. The move would also cement growing fear in immigrant communities that the census is not to be trusted.

Further, it’s simply too late to raise questions like this.... read more

posted by Nezua | 1 comment

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Weekly Pulse: Joe Lieberman and the Opt-Out Revolution (9:53 am)

Progressives rejoiced when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced this week that the final Senate health care bill would include a public option. The announcement was a major victory for left-wing Democrats.

Better yet, it would be a public option without a trigger. Earlier proposals called for a triggered public option which would only take effect if private insurers failed to bring down costs on their own. Under the opt-out compromise, the public option would come on line automatically (albeit not until 2013), but states would later have the option of quitting.

The jubilation was short-lived. Alex Koppelman of Salon explains:

Progressives didn’t even get 24 hours to celebrate the victory they won in getting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to include a version of the public option in his health care reform bill. The celebration was cut off Tuesday afternoon with the news that Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., will vote with Senate Republicans to filibuster the legislation.

The Democrats have 60 Senate votes. If they all vote for cloture, a procedural motion to stop debate, the Republicans can’t filibuster the bill. The Senators who vote for cloture can still vote against the bill. Reid’s strategy for passing the bill was to get all Democrats to vote for cloture and let them vote their conscience on the actual bill. Even without Lieberman, Democrats have the votes to pass the bill by majority vote if they can avoid a filibuster.

Health care is the most important domestic policy initiative of the Obama administration. Would Joe Lieberman really torpedo reform? The Senate leadership thinks Reid is bluffing, according to Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly.

I understand the argument. Lieberman loves attention and power. By threatening to join the Republican filibuster, he gets both—Democrats have to scramble to make him happy, since there’s no margin for error in putting together 60 votes. Lieberman gets to feel very important for the next several weeks by making this threat less than 24 hours after Harry Reid stated his intentions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he wants to be known forever as The Senator Who Killed... read more

posted by Lindsay Beyerstein | start the discussion

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Weekly Audit: Dismantling the Wall Street Casino (1:04 pm)

Bailout pay czar Ken Feinberg raised a ruckus last week when he announced plans to slash cash payouts to executives at seven companies that have received massive levels of taxpayer support. While better oversight of the bailout barons is helpful, the best way to change Wall Street pay practices is to adopt a set of tough, comprehensive regulations that cover everything from the executive suite to the loan department. As is, many of the executives Feinberg cracked down on will still make millions this year from stocks and other perks, while the very banks that depend the most on bailout money are spending like mad to lobby against reform.

Feinberg’s new salary limits only apply to executives at Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG, GM, Chrysler, GMAC and Chrysler Financial. But while these new rules are an effort to reduce the incentive for executives to take big risks for short-term gains, the rules of the game for non-bailout barons haven’t changed at all. Risky securities trading and unenforced consumer protection regulations still allow financiers to make a killing by gambling on mortgages and credit cards.

As Greg Kaufmann explains for The Nation, Feinberg has been barred from altering some of the most egregious bonus arrangements at even the biggest fund recipients, as the employment contracts were signed prior to the government’s bailout. AIG plans to pay out $198 million in bonuses in March 2010, and none of Feinberg’s recent rulings will change that. As Kaufmann also notes, back in March, AIG agreed to pay pack $45 million of the bonuses it shelled out early this year. After over seven months, just $19 million has been repaid.

The government’s hands-off approach to AIG employment contracts is a rather flagrant display of deference to executives. Nothing stopped the government from renegotiating contracts for union laborers when it bailed out Chrysler and GM, as Dean Baker notes for The American Prospect.

Lest we forget, the government literally owns AIG, and would own both Citigroup and Bank of America had it demanded a market rate of return for its investment. Taxpayers injected several times the stock... read more

posted by Zach Carter | 2 comments

Friday, October 23, 2009

Noam Chomsky Rejected by Guantanamo (2:09 pm)

Two weeks ago, news broke that Noam Chomsky’s writings aren’t suitable reading for Guantanamo detainees.

The Miami Herald reports that a Pentagon defense lawyer sent an Arabic translation of Chomsky’s Interventions, published in 2007, to the prison camp’s library earlier this year. The lawyer’s donation was rejected without explanation, but was returned with a list of restricted literature, including that supposedly espousing “anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Western” ideology.

Chomsky, the prolific 80-year-old professor emeritus of linguistics at MIT, has been a prominent critic of American foreign policy since the Vietnam era. When he received news of the prison’s decision, he said: “This happens sometimes in totalitarian regimes.”

The post-9/11 essays comprising Interventions were originally distributed by the New York Times Syndicate as columns. (Earlier this year, In These Times began publishing Chomsky’s monthly column; the Times Syndicate told us no other U.S. publication publishes it.) The book discusses America’s international policy in the era of George W. Bush, fiercely criticizing the interventionist mentality that guides decision-making.

Gitmo’s library currently houses over 16,000 works, with Harry Potter a popular favorite. Although President Obama pledged to shut down the facility by early 2010, Guantanamo staff say they are trying to improve the quality of life at the polarizing prison until then.

A founding In These Times sponsor, Chomsky has been a good friend to the magazine since its inception. The affection is mutual: Last year, ITT offered Interventions as a gift to donors. The magazine’s staff is deeply disturbed by this blatant act of government censorship.

Chonsky’s most recent monthly column, “Barack Obama and the Unipolar Moment,” can be read here.

posted by Chenault Taylor | 3 comments

Why Republicans Have More Fun (11:13 am)

If you’ve noticed, Republicans allow themselves a lot more space for self-expression than do Democrats. Reps can fly as far right as their dark fantasies will carry them. So, their cohorts are dense with yahoos bent on refighting the Northern War of Aggression, rewriting the Bible to make it more business friendly, reviving slavery, removing fluoride from school books, and issuing Glocks to all newborns.

They can candidly champion Vlad the Impaler because the extreme right, for all of its wackiness, is business friendly. Indeed, their lumpen legions have traditionally provided cheerleaders and strikebreakers for our corporate sector. Thus our body politic accepts them and our media heed them no matter what nonsense they spew.

By contrast, the Democrats are intensely uptight. The uttermost sin in their ranks is any expression of leftism beyond what it takes to persuade voters that Dems are slightly more progressive than Reps. To put personalities on that policy, Pelosi is presentable but Kucinich is poison. Naderism, or anything to its port side, is the ultimate evil.

The obvious reason is that leftism, as opposed to centrism and rightism, challenges corporate rule. And by leftism, I don’t mean Lenin, Mao, Che and bloody revolution. We’ve moved so far to the right in recent decades that even the business as usual we used to practice is now seen as subversive.

Consider the case of Paul Volcker. A literal and figurative Wall Street giant at 6’8”, Volcker spent a lifetime serving the Rockefeller interests and presiding over the Federal Reserve under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Not exactly a pink resume.

President Obama named Volcker as a top adviser on the economy. The problem is that the advice that Volcker is giving the prez is considered a pinch too old-style Democratic for the Obamacrats. Volcker, like FDR, wants to cut the wild bulls of Wall Street down to size by re-restricting banks to banking and brokerages to brokering. It was under such a regime that we enjoyed 60 years of a thriving industrial economy and few financial follies.

“The banks are there to serve the public,” Mr. Volcker... read more

posted by Pete Karman | 1 comment

Weekly Mulch: Autumn Fools (9:36 am)

After several prominent members left the Chamber of Commerce over its prehistoric climate change policies, the organization appeared to do an about-face on its climate stance during a press conference on Monday. Sound too good to be true? It was. Members of the Yes Men, a group of satirical, anti-corporate activists, posed as Chamber of Commerce officials and held a fake press conference claiming that “There is only one sound way to do business: That’s to support a strong climate-change bill quickly, so that this December in Copenhagen, President Obama can lead the entire business world in ensuring our long-term prosperity.” In reality, the Chamber has not changed their climate stance and continues to oppose climate change legislation. The Yes Men’s stunt is just one more in a chain of hoaxes this Autumn, including a boy in a balloon, death panels on health care reform, and recent allegations that radical Islamists are using interns to infiltrate Capitol Hill.

In an interview with Dave Gilson of Mother Jones, Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum explains that the Chamber’s absurd stance inspired them to take action. By staging a fake change of heart, Bichlbaum hoped to reveal that the Chamber’s real climate policy is “A big hoax on the American public.” Bichlbaum stresses that the U.S. has a major stake in the outcome of Copenhagen. “The chamber is opposing climate change legislation and the whole rest of the world is saying we need to do something…The chamber, representing the biggest and stodgiest and most powerful corporations in America is just saying, ‘Nah, let’s let the whole planet go to rot.’”

The Yes Men are notorious for their stunts, as Amy Goodman notes for Truthdig. “The Yes Men stage elaborate hoaxes on global-trade organizations, multinational corporations and politicians. They satirically skewer corporate, free trade, pro-business positions by acting as genuine, sincere spokespeople for these institutions, often offering apologies for past corporate crimes or promoting absurd products with remarkably straight faces at industry conferences.” During the press conference, an actual employee of the Chamber interrupted to declare that the event was fake, but this only prompted more... read more

posted by Raquel Brown | start the discussion

Thursday, October 22, 2009

The Weekly Diaspora: We Can Prosper Together (11:10 am)

For the most part, it’s been a good week for immigration reform. The Senate approved a measure that will end the “Widow Penalty,” which rescinded applications for U.S. residency if one’s spouse of two years or less years dies, and on Tuesday, as RaceWire reports, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed legislation that restores the right of due process to immigrant youth.

Now for the not-so good news: The U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has decided to modify, not cancel, its many 287(g) agreements, as the Colorado Independent reports. Cause for celebration on this change may not yet be warranted. The proposed modification does not address the problems inherent to the provision.

According to ICE data, 55 jurisdictions have signed “new standardized agreements” with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). 12 others are pending agreement. ICE now requires police officers who turn in undocumented immigrants to follow through on “All criminal charges that originally caused the offender to be taken into custody.” But what measures has ICE taken to eradicate the racial profiling that has tainted the reputation of the 287(g) provision? The ACLU does not feel the modification is enough. And it’s hard to see how it could be. Under the modifications, the police would still be perceived by the immigrant community as prosecutors and potential border guards, not protectors to work with for the good of a neighborhood.

Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio is a perfect example of why the White House needs to cease all 287(g) agreements. Reporting for AlterNet, Isabel Macdonald chronicles the bizarre antics and mindset of the rogue lawman. Arpaio’s 287(g) agreement with the Federal government was recently downgraded. He can no longer perform his “over broad” sweeps, but Macdonald makes clear that this change is mostly symbolic. Arpaio is simply “An official who has come to expect total impunity.”

Another small, but meaningful step happened recently Milwaukee, as Leticia Miranda reports for RaceWire. Matt Nelson, a Milwaukee small business owner and spokesman for the Milwaukee Police Accountability Coalition, was harassed by police and threatened when he refused to reveal his Social... read more