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Let’s Draft Our Kids – NYTimes.com

11 Jul

An interesting proposal. But I’d like it better if it was coupled with a commitment to NO MORE WAR.

A revived draft, including both males and females, should include three options for new conscripts coming out of high school. Some could choose 18 months of military service with low pay but excellent post-service benefits, including free college tuition. These conscripts would not be deployed but could perform tasks currently outsourced at great cost to the Pentagon: paperwork, painting barracks, mowing lawns, driving generals around, and generally doing lower-skills tasks so professional soldiers don’t have to. If they want to stay, they could move into the professional force and receive weapons training, higher pay and better benefits.

That is, the fighting would be done by those who volunteer to do it.

Those who don’t want to serve in the army could perform civilian national service for a slightly longer period and equally low pay — teaching in low-income areas, cleaning parks, rebuilding crumbling infrastructure, or aiding the elderly. After two years, they would receive similar benefits like tuition aid.

And libertarians who object to a draft could opt out. Those who declined to help Uncle Sam would in return pledge to ask nothing from him — no Medicare, no subsidized college loans and no mortgage guarantees. Those who want minimal government can have it.

via Let’s Draft Our Kids – NYTimes.com.

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‘When We Go Out, the Lights Go Out’: Workers Locked Out at Con Ed | The Nation

10 Jul

Hundreds of union members have descended on New York power utility Consolidated Edison’s corporate headquarters in Manhattan following the company’s decision to lock out 8,500 of its unionized workers in the midst of contract negotiations. Workers were sent home on July 1 after Local 1-2 of the Utility Workers Union refused to agree to give seven days’ notice before a strike. Only weeks after the debacle of the Wisconsin recall, and the subsequent consternation among many in the labor movement, it seems these boisterous union members missed the message that labor is on its way out.

About 500 union members, most of them from Local 1-2 but with contingents from SEIU Local 32BJ, CWA Local 1101 and TWU Local 100, among others, have been picketing outside Con Ed’s headquarters each day since the lockout began on July 1. Today, however, that number increased to more than a thousand, as Con Ed canceled healthcare coverage for Local 1-2 members as part of its effort to ramp up pressure on the union. Other pickets have been set up at Con Ed job sites around the region. The contract dispute centers on the fact that Con Ed wants to get rid of defined-benefit pensions and drastically increase union members’ healthcare contributions.

Lockouts have become increasingly common in recent years, as employers have become more and more proactive at trying to force givebacks on union members.

via ‘When We Go Out, the Lights Go Out’: Workers Locked Out at Con Ed | The Nation.

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For the Ron Paul Wing, Now What? – NYTimes.com

22 Jun

There are now

two significant competing visions of what the Republican Party will be, a struggle, by the way, that is no longer between a vast majority and a tiny fringe. Paul people consider themselves not weird outsiders, but the true conservatives who actually want to rein in government within affordable, constitutional limits. Ron Paul’s campaign spokesmen are quick to distance themselves from any hint of the Paul movement being an angry, raucous anti-establishment rabble — the words “respect” and “decorum” flow from their lips as much as “limited government” and “end the Fed now.”

via For the Ron Paul Wing, Now What? – NYTimes.com.

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Wiping out for-profit schools – Student Loan Debt – Salon.com

20 Jun

On a conference call with reporters Wednesday morning, Sen. Kay Hagan, D-N.C., promoted a bill she has introduced that would prohibit for-profit colleges from using taxpayer-funded financial aid for marketing, recruiting or advertising purposes.

Make no mistake, Hagan’s bill, if it becomes law, would cut for-profit schools off at their knees. The top 15 publicly traded for-profit colleges derive 85 percent of their revenue from federal financial aid. If they can’t spend that money on marketing, recruiting and advertising, then they effectively can’t market, recruit or advertise — or at least not at anywhere near the scale they currently do.

via Wiping out for-profit schools – Student Loan Debt – Salon.com.

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Aaron Swartz: Chris Hayes’ The Twilight of The Elites — Crooked Timber

18 Jun

We thought we would just simply pick out the best and raise them to the top, but once they got there they inevitably used their privilege to entrench themselves and their kids (inequality is, Hayes says, “autocatalytic”). Opening up the elite to more efficient competition didn’t make things more fair, it just legitimated a more intense scramble. The result was an arms race among the elite, pushing all of them to embrace the most unscrupulous forms of cheating and fraud to secure their coveted positions. As competition takes over at the high end, personal worth resolves into exchange value, and the elite power accumulated in one sector can be traded for elite power in another… This creates a unitary elite, detached from the bulk of society, yet at the same time even more insecure…

The result is that our elites are trapped in a bubble, where the usual pointers toward accuracy (unanimity, proximity, good faith) only lead them astray. And their distance from the way the rest of the country really lives makes it impossible for them to do their jobs justly—they just don’t get the necessary feedback. The only cure is to reduce economic inequality, a view that has surprisingly support among the population (clear majorities want to close the deficit by raising taxes on the rich, which is more than can be said for any other plan). And while Hayes is not a fan of heightening the contradictions, it is possible that the next crisis will bring with it the opportunity to win this change.

via Guest Review by Aaron Swartz: Chris Hayes’ The Twilight of The Elites — Crooked Timber.

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Drone Warfare…Medea Benjamin’s new book reviewed by Lynn Feinerman | Tikkun Magazine

18 Jun

Illuminating the pivotal reason why her articulate book is so very timely, and so very much needed, she informs us that drones themselves are not silent like the press. They are not voiceless. They have a vocal advocacy group in Congress: The Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus. Yes, these machines have their own Congressional caucus!

“It seems that, like corporations, robots are people too…” quips Medea Benjamin. That quip cuts deeply, to the underlying reality of our nation: Dwight D. Eisenhower cautioned us about it. He warned us back in the ’50′s that the US was not disarming after World War II. We chose instead to militarize in order to jump start a lagging post-war economy, sucking our taxes into obscene military budgets, with rampant corporate profiteering from “endless war” manufacture, and with a Congress and Executive branch going right along with the program.

The US is hooked on war. Its so-called “economy” is so tied into the vicious cycle of ravaging the world for oil, feeding the war machine with that oil and our taxes, then going out to ravage again for oil, that the problems of any number of innocent civilians it harms don’t really amount to a hill of beans in most media …as Bogart said in CASABLANCA.

via Drone Warfare…Medea Benjamin’s new book reviewed by Lynn Feinerman | Tikkun Magazine.

Resolve to Overturn ‘Citizens United’ Spreads Through the States | The Nation

14 Jun

People don’t want to see a repeat of Wisconsin, where more than $63 million was spent in the recall election ($50 million went to Walker)—much of it from out of state, including $24 million from outside groups. Local public officials also realize that they can’t raise the kind of resources a handpicked, corporate-favored candidate can now access. There is also an obscenely exorbitant presidential campaign on the horizon with a price tag expected to reach $2 billion or more, including hundreds of millions of dollars flowing in from wealthy and corporate interests. In May alone, conservative groups spent $20 million in just nine swing states and Michigan.

Legislators have clearly reached their own conclusion that there is an “appearance of corruption.” Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia have joined Montana in asking the Supreme Court to uphold the state’s ban on corporate expenditures. This coalition is a mix of red, blue, and purple states, including New York, Arkansas, California, Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina, Utah, Vermont and West Virginia. Senators John McCain and Sheldon Whitehouse also filed an amicus brief in support of Montana, writing, “Evidence from the 2010 and 2012 electoral cycles has demonstrated that so-called independent expenditures create a strong potential for corruption and the perception thereof.”

via Resolve to Overturn ‘Citizens United’ Spreads Through the States | The Nation.

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Two Worlds Cracking Up – NYTimes.com

14 Jun

Ah, but you forget, Mr. Friedman, that we’ve got this too-big-to-fail banking system, a monster of a military-industrial complex, and a federal government that’s held hostage to ideologues. Against those rigidities our “flexible federal system” is of little avail.

In Europe, hyperconnectedness both exposed just how uncompetitive some of their economies were, but also how interdependent they had become. It was a deadly combination. When countries with such different cultures become this interconnected and interdependent — when they share the same currency but not the same work ethics, retirement ages or budget discipline — you end up with German savers seething at Greek workers, and vice versa.

And us? America’s flexible federal system makes it, theoretically, well-suited to thrive in a hyperconnected world, but only if we get our macroeconomic house in order and our education up to par (or better). We should be the world’s island of stability today. But we’re not. As Mohamed el-Erian, the chief executive of the bond giant Pimco, puts it, “We’re just the cleanest dirty shirt around.”

via Two Worlds Cracking Up – NYTimes.com.

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Economic stagnation: Obama’s white flight problem | The Economist

14 Jun

Hmmm. . . I sure is hard to have faith in a political system that keeps throwing up lousy choices.

The “framed choice” strategy is basically this: Everyone knows that pensions (Social Security) and health care (Medicare, Medicaid, child health programmes) are going to bankrupt the nation unless they are “right-sized” to revenue and existing debt. Whoever is elected president in 2012 will have to “right-size” these programmes over the course of the next four years. The framed choice for the white voters who will decide this election is this: Who do you think will better protect the interests of working-class and middle-class families when the inevitable cuts are packaged? Who do you want negotiating for you when it comes down to who gets hurt and who doesn’t? Do you really want Mitt Romney and a bunch of right-wing congressmen making these decisions?

Andrew Sullivan agrees that the framed-choice (and not the negative, scorched-earth) strategy is Mr Obama’s best bet, and that it may be. But how good a bet is it, really? We all know that incumbents don’t often survive poor economic conditions, and that Mr Obama, who inherited a financial crisis and a deep recession, was dealt a crap hand. But if recession raises the stakes of zero-sum distributive politics, and if that, in turn, heightens the extent to which distributive politics is simply identity politics, Mr Obama’s crap hand may be worse than we thought. If, as Mr Friedman argues, economic stagnation brings out the worst in us, that suggests a bad economy will penalise a black incumbent more than it will penalise a white incumbent.

via Economic stagnation: Obama’s white flight problem | The Economist.

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Bernie Sanders on the ‘Aggressiveness Among the Ruling Class’ | The Nation

12 Jun

“There is,” the senator says, “an aggressiveness out there among the ruling class of this country, among the billionaires who are saying: ‘You know what? Ya, we got a whole lot now, but we want even more. And we don’t give a damn about the middle class. We don’t care about working families. We want it all. And now we can buy it.’ ”

Referring to Wisconsin as a “testing ground” for the no-limits campaign spending that has been ushered in by the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, Sanders said, “I have a deep concern that what we saw in Wisconsin can happen in any state throughout this country and in the presidential election.”

“I think that people do not fully understand the disaster that Citizens United was,” Sanders said of the 5–4 US Supreme Court decision in radio conversation with Ed Schultz. “What that did is open the floodgates so that billionaires like the Koch brothers and others are now prepared to spend unbelievable sums of money to elect extreme right-wing candidates.”

via Bernie Sanders on the ‘Aggressiveness Among the Ruling Class’ | The Nation.

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