We Fight Low Information
Brent Budowsky: The Senate becomes a farce: Democrats propose, Republicans filibuster. Democrats retreat, Congress recesses. Tiny victories are hailed as great achievements. The Democratic legacy is dumbed down by the day. The voice of a generation is silenced.
Ellen Brown: The fiscal cliff has been said to be holding Congress hostage to conservative demands, but the real hostages are the debt slaves of our financial system.
Shamus Cooke: Literally the day after the election a sudden “urgency” gripped the nation: the imminent danger of the so-called “fiscal cliff” — the national automatic tax increases and spending cuts due in January.
Robert Reich: We spend billions on Cold War weapons systems like nuclear attack submarines, aircraft carriers, and manned combat fighters that pump up the bottom lines of defense contractors but have nothing to do with 21st-century combat.
Robert Reich: It doesn’t even matter that the new Republican tax cut plan would probably raise taxes on many lower-income Americans, All that matters is the headlines.
Andy Love: As California cuts critically important funds, the state continues to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into one government program that is expensive, arbitrary and ineffectual: the death penalty.
Norman Solomon: Call me old-fashioned, but I believe in the vital lessons of the New Deal. Many millions of good jobs must be created — and that will require well-funded federal jobs programs on a large scale.
Robert Reich: Now that we’re slouching toward a double-dip recession, the only hope is voters will tell their members of Congress to stop obsessing about future budget deficits and get to work on the real crisis of unemployment, falling wages, and no growth.
Sharon Kyle; President Obama has the wrong team Cornel West told a reporter. The poor, particularly blacks and browns are suffering under his leadership.
Randy Shaw: Obama’s history includes many great speeches advocating for “change we can believe in,” but as even his most fervid admirers acknowledge, his governance has been quite different.
Marian Wang: Though the budget deal struck by lawmakers over the weekend averted a shutdown of the federal government, it still has open-government advocates worried about a shutdown of another sort: a shutdown in transparency.
I don’t recall how or when single-payer was taken “off the table” – except that Senator Max Baucus said it was. Without single payer, progressives focused on the public option – which although a compromise, could have held insurance companies accountable. Everyone knew it was tough and compromise would happen, but we were supposed to be part of that decision.
Now we have a Republican governor in California who sees the state’s current budget catastrophe as nothing but a big joke. Why else would Arnold Schwarzenegger post a tasteless Twitter video where he wields a two-foot-long folding knife boasting about his budget-cutting prowess?
When Arnold Schwarzenegger calls an agreement “a really great, great accomplishment” you know average Californians are in for a fleecing.
Southern Republican Governors Haley Barbour of Mississippi, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Rick Perry of Texas, and Mark Sanford of South Carolina are making noises about “refusing” federal dollars from President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package. They are posturing in a way reminiscent of an earlier generation of Southern governors who stood for “states’ rights,” which [...]
Michael Sigman: For many old-media types I talked to, there was more resignation than outrage this time around, as though a cherished institution were already gone.
Julie Driscoll: Students and their parents’ only hope is Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown, two Democratic Senators who have the cojones to take on big banks, Wall Street, and the powers that be.
Berry Craig: Called the “Ride for Respect,” the demonstration at Walmart corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, will be modeled on civil rights volunteers who rode buses into the South in the 1960s to protest Jim Crow racial injustice.
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It’ll Be an All-Cuts Budget “Deal” (Just Like California)
Joseph Palermo: The debt ceiling gambit that Republicans in the House of Representatives have used to tie the U.S. government in knots in recent months is simply the California GOP’s tactic writ large.