News & Comment

Early last year, when Attorney General Eric Holder took a strong stand against voter-identification laws, he emphasized how much they violate core American ideals. “What we are talking here is a constitutional right,” he said. “This is not a privilege. The right to vote is something that is fundamental to who we are as Americans. We have people who have given their lives—people have sacrificed a great deal in order for people to have the right to vote. It’s what distinguishes the United States from most other countries.” The problem is: Eric Holder is wrong. Unlike citizens in every other advanced democracy—and many other developing ones—Americans don’t have a right to vote. Popular perception notwithstanding, the Constitution provides no explicit guarantee of voting rights. read more »

Should the Supreme Court uphold it, last Friday’s decision by three Reagan-appointees to the D.C. Circuit Appellate Court appears at first glance to rejigger the balance of power between Congress and the president. The appellate justices struck down three recess appointments that President Obama had made to the five-member National Labor Relations Board during the break between the 2011 and 2012 sessions of Congress partly on the grounds that Congress wasn’t formally in recess. It’s not that Obama has made a lot of recess appointments. He’s only made 32—compared to the 171 made by George W. Bush. Presidents have been making recess appointments since the mid-19th century, but this is the first time that the courts have objected. Certainly, the three judges on the D.C. appellate court voiced no such opinions when Bush was president. The real issue here is who Obama appointed, and to what agencies. read more »

In the past 20 years, the world has witnessed the death of social contracts. We have seen a massive breakdown in trust between citizens, their economies and their governments. In our own country, we can point to years of data painting a bleak picture of the confidence Americans have in any of our traditional institutions. Former assumptions and shared notions about fairness, agreements, reciprocity, mutual benefits, social values and expected futures have all but disappeared. The collapse of financial systems and the resulting economic crisis not only have caused instability, insecurity and human pain; they have also generated a growing disbelief and fundamental distrust in the way things operate and how decisions are made. read more »

Unsurprisingly, most Americans are split between various misconceptions of what Social Security and Medicare are. Many, particularly right-wing politicians and their media mouthpieces, see them as pure tax-and-transfer programs: they gather money from one set of people and give it to another set of people. From this point of view, they are bad bad bad bad bad and should be cut. Many others, particularly beneficiaries and people who hope to see beneficiaries, see them as earned benefits. The common conception is that you pay in while you’re working, so you earned the benefits you get in retirement. You didn’t “earn” them in the moral sense that people who work hard should get benefits; you “earned” them in the accounting sense that you’re just getting back “your” money that you set aside during your career. Both of these perspectives are wrong, the latter more obviously so. read more »

House Republicans aren’t voting to lift the debt ceiling. They’re voting to suspend it for three months. It’s an entirely political, meaningless distinction, but it points the way towards an entirely sensible, overdue solution. Temporarily suspending the debt-ceiling raises some troubling technical questions. But it also sets a delightful precedent. Congress will have shown it can make the debt ceiling disappear. For three months, the debt ceiling simply won’t exist. And it won’t exist for exactly the right reasons. Republicans are admitting that when they choose to “suspend” the debt ceiling rather than raise it — this way, no one can accuse them of raising it, even though that’s exactly what they’ve done. The only problem with their plan is it doesn’t go far enough. We shouldn’t suspend the debt ceiling for three months. We should suspend it forever, completely eliminating the threat that this hard, unpleasant, confusing vote could go wrong and unleash economic havoc. read more »

Peace of mind. That’s what Medicare and Medicaid mean for nearly one in every three Americans. Almost 50 million Americans have paid into, and are beneficiaries of Medicare, our national health insurance program for seniors and people with disabilities. And almost 50 million Americans — the elderly, low-income adults and their children, and people with certain disabilities — have access to Medicaid. Six million Americans depend on both. But now these programs are under siege. read more »

In his remarks on the so-called “fiscal cliff,” and in numerous campaign speeches, President Obama has repeatedly remarked that “we can’t just cut our way to prosperity,” and that “if we’re serious about reducing the deficit, we have to combine spending cuts with revenue. And that means asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more in taxes." This is welcome news. But the president’s focus on taxes and the deficit is only part of the story. A far better exercise would be to move away from the right’s obsession with the deficit and open up a conversation with the American people about a far more critical issue facing the nation: the ever-widening gulf between the rich and the rest of us and the very real consequences that this disparity in income has had on our economy and indeed on the very nature of our democracy. read more »

I joined Campaign for America's Future's Richard Eskow to talk about the "fiscal cliff" scare, austerity, Social Security, Medicare and how we WON the election so we really should be talking about jobs instead. This was a GREAT hour, and hold the information you need to arm yourself to win holiday-dinner conversations with your right-wing brother-in-law. read more »

Justice Department just entered into the largest criminal settlement in U.S. history with the giant oil company BP. BP plead guilty to 14 criminal counts, including manslaughter, and agreed to pay $4 billion over the next five years. This is loony. Mind you, I’m appalled by the carelessness and indifference of the BP executives responsible for the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that killed eleven people on April 20, 2010, and unleashed the worst oil spill in American history. But it defies logic to make BP itself the criminal. Corporations aren’t people. They can’t know right from wrong. They’re incapable of criminal intent. They have no brains. They’re legal fictions. Can we please get a grip? The only sentient beings in a corporation are the people who run them or work for them. When it comes to criminality, they’re the ones who should be punished. read more »

Ohio Senator Sherror Brown won reelection by "waging class warfare" using middle-class populism. Here is how. read more »