Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes Insurance and Freedom:
As I’ve already suggested, the old trick of blaming the needy for their need doesn’t seem to play the way it used to, and especially not on health care: perhaps because the experience of losing insurance is so common, Medicaid enjoys remarkably strong public support. And now that health reform is the law of the land, the economic and fiscal case for individual states to accept Medicaid expansion is overwhelming. That’s why business interests strongly support expansion just about everywhere — even in Texas. But such practical concerns can be set aside if you can successfully argue that insurance is slavery.
Michael Lind at
Salon writes
Obama making historic mistake on Social Security:
While cutting Social Security makes no sense at all in terms of economics or public policy, it makes excellent sense in terms of the selfish class interests of the super-rich. They have extracted about half the gains from economic growth in the U.S. in the last half-century and recycle some of their profits to fund politicians, and lobbyists, as well as mercenary propagandists who pose as neutral think tank experts. Social Security’s contribution to the retirement income of the rich is negligible, while the top 20 percent receives around 80 percent of the income from tax-favored private retirement savings accounts like 401Ks. Naturally many of America’s oligarchs want the public discussion to be solely about cutting Social Security benefits for the bottom 80 percent, rather than 401Ks for the top 20 percent. To paraphrase Leona Helmsley, Social Security is for the little people. And if we cannot afford all of our present public-plus-private retirement system … well, as the saying in Tsarist Russia had it, let any shortage be shared among the peasants.
Curtis Hubbard, editorial page editor at the
Denver Post, blasts Denver's eight-term Democratic congresswoman for not knowing how gun magazines work in
Rep. Diana DeGette's self-inflicted wound:
While headline-grabbing statements come from the extreme right and left, a great number of Coloradans are somewhere in the sensible middle on issues like universal background checks, magazine limits and support for tougher gun laws.
I expect we'll see as much in November of next year, if not sooner.
More punditry can be found below the fold.
Debra J. Saunders at the San Francisco Chronicle complains about Feel-Good Bills That Turn Into Do-Nothing Laws (free link):
Basically, the gun haters are angry about Newtown. They blame lawful gun owners for the behavior of criminals, so they support nuisance laws that restrict the behavior of people who are not like them. Their instinct is not to identify a problem and then figure out how best to solve it, if possible, but to punish and marginalize people who want to take control of their own self-defense.
They forget that these gun owners have rights.
A.B. Stoddard at
The Hill jumps on the bandwagon to say
Gun control may have to wait:
Democrats and advocates of new gun restrictions are clinging to the hope that Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) could step into the fray to rescue their efforts. They shouldn’t hold their breath. Coburn is under well-publicized pressure from an outfit called Gun Owners of America, which, according to The New York Times, boasted its members “irritated” the senator with constant pleas against background checks but nonetheless succeeded in changing his mind. Democrats have dug up an ad McCain cut in 2000 in which he declares he has evolved on the issue of background checks, and that “with rights come responsibilities.” At this point it won’t be easy to bring Coburn back to the table, and without Coburn, McCain would just be dismissed as having one of his fits of mavericky-ness that was sure to pass.
Peter Rugh at Waging NonViolence.org and
In These Times writes
NYC Fast Food Workers Super-Size Their Struggle:
Two economic revolutions of the 1970s—automation and globalization—have also contributed to the downward spiral of wages over the last few decades. Automation has meant that fewer hands are needed for industrialized labor, while advances in transportation technology exported jobs overseas. Both pushed more and more people into the service industry. Meanwhile, radical organizers were systematically rooted out of unions during the Cold War under the guise of fighting the internal threat of communism. Left in charge were those who preferred to operate unions with a top-down business-friendly model, a shift in the labor movement that also hampered the expansion of worker power.
Today, as the economic recession continues, employers have a surplus of low-wage labor and only flashes of organizing to oppose the resulting exploitation—a dynamic that is leading to a surge in corporate profits even as wages decline. This disparity is particularly pronounced in the fast-food industry. In the most extreme example, net profits for McDonald’s totaled $5.5 billion last year, while the company’s rank-and-file report being forced to picket for a raise above minimum wage. As America gradually becomes a low-wage nation, fast-food workers on the picket lines in New York are in the vanguard of a struggle to preserve the interests of working people against corporate profits.
Susan Eisenberg, at
The Progressive deplores the fact that
Women in trades still waiting for fairness:
Only 1.6 percent of carpenters, 1.8 percent of electricians, 1.3 percent of operating engineers, 2.9 percent of construction laborers and 2.5 percent of the overall trades work force are female, according to the latest reports from the Department of Labor.
Michael Meyers at the
New York Daily News writes
Dr. Carson, heal thyself:
I am a liberal, a black one, and took offense to his charge that white liberals are “the most racist people there are” — because they, according to the diagnosis of Dr. Carson, “put you in a little category, a box. You have to think this way; how could you dare come off the plantation?”
Doctor, doctor! That’s the kind of racial rhetoric and paranoia one might expect from a hothead, not from a renowned brain surgeon whose legend, maturity and mastery over a youthful uncontrollable temper are memorialized in film “Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger at the
Los Angeles Times writes
California's silent disaster:
The draft National Climate Assessment, now being circulated for comment and scheduled for release this year by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, presents a sobering vision of the world that awaits us if we don't act.
This team of top climate scientists has concluded that our region of the country is hotter than it has ever been and that it will get hotter — because of humans. The last decade was the hottest the Southwestern U.S. has experienced — on average 2 degrees warmer than it had been historically. The scientists project a further increase over the next 50 years of 6 to 9 degrees if we do nothing.
Paul Chávez at
The Guardian writes about his father, César Chávez in
Only full immigration reform can do justice to the memory of Cesar Chavez:
There is no more fitting way to honor my dad than for farm workers and other good Americans to push for comprehensive immigration reform that benefits all workers, from the agriculture industry, to the service sector, to the construction business.
Before he began organizing farm workers, Cesar Chavez won state old-age pensions for non-citizen immigrants. When he started organizing in 1962, visiting workers up and down the state, my father insisted that the union must represent everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity or immigration status. My dad helped work against the infamous bracero guest worker program that exploited both domestic and imported farm workers, and which Congress finally ended in 1964.
When the first table grape contracts were won in 1970, some demanded the UFW check the legal status of union members. My father refused, insisting that:
"Our job is to help good, hardworking people no matter who they are."