Paul Krugman at The New York Times once again does what his right-wing critics hate the most, mixes economics with politics, which they view as illegitimate except when they are the ones doing it:
The last few decades have been tough for many American workers, but especially hard on those employed in retail trade — a category that includes both the sales clerks at your local Walmart and the staff at your local McDonald’s. Despite the lingering effects of the financial crisis, America is a much richer country than it was 40 years ago. But the inflation-adjusted wages of nonsupervisory workers in retail trade — who weren’t particularly well paid to begin with — have fallen almost 30 percent since 1973.
So can anything be done to help these workers, many of whom depend on food stamps — if they can get them — to feed their families, and who depend on Medicaid — again, if they can get it — to provide essential health care? Yes. We can preserve and expand food stamps, not slash the program the way Republicans want. We can make health reform work, despite right-wing efforts to undermine the program.
And we can raise the minimum wage.
Gabrielle Giffords and Eric Schneiderman at the
Washington Post write—
A new model for background checks at gun shows:
Last weekend, at the Saratoga Springs Arms Fair, one of the largest gun shows in New York, we saw firsthand a new model for background checks at such events. It would ensure that all gun purchasers get background checks quickly and easily.
It works like this: Guns are tagged at the entrances to the show. Show operators provide access to federally licensed gun dealers to do background checks before completing a sale. All guns are checked on the way out to ensure that background checks were performed.
It’s that simple.
These procedures do not infringe on anyone’s constitutional right to bear arms. Rather, they recognize that responsible gun laws go hand-in-hand with the free exercise of gun rights.
Jared Bernstein at the Economix blog of
The New York Times writes—
Paths to Full Employment:
Economists like me, who stress the importance of full employment, have a bad habit. We go on and on about the problem of slack labor markets – their negative impact on the living standards of middle- and lower-income families, their persistence in recent decades – and then we stop without saying what might be done about it. At best, our closing paragraph might include a nod at fiscal or monetary policy, but that’s it.
Here are five ideas, developed with Dean Baker in our recent book on the path back to full employment (wherein you can find more detailed discussions) and soon to be further elaborated, as you’ll read at the end:
Better Fiscal Policy [...] Honey, I Shrunk the Wrong Deficit! [...] Direct Job Creation [...] Work-Sharing [...] Infrastructure Investment
More pundit excerpts can be read below the fold.
Katrina vanden Heuvel at The Nation writes—This Week in ‘Nation’ History: Pardoning the Scottsboro Boys, Eighty Years Too Late:
Eighty-two years after being pulled off a Memphis-bound freight train, accused of raping two white women, threatened with lynching and subjected to years of blatant miscarriages of justice, the three Scottsboro Boys who had not yet been acquitted or pardoned were cleared by the state of Alabama on November 21. “Today is a reminder that it is never too late to right a wrong,” said State Senator Arthur Orr, who sponsored a bill to create a legal framework for the pardon. But however important as a symbolic gesture, the overdue action only underscored the fact that justice delayed is by definition justice denied: Clarence Norris, the last of the Scottsboro Boys, died in 1989.
Edited and published at the time by NAACP co-founder Oswald Garrison Villard, The Nation immediately recognized Scottsboro as a vital front in the battle for civil rights and dispatched associate editor Dorothy Van Doren to Alabama to report on the case. Eight of the nine boys arrested had been charged in a snap trial lasting less than two weeks and were scheduled to hang in June 1931, but that date was postponed as a motion for a new trial was granted. They would remain in legal limbo, enduring numerous retrials and new convictions at the hands of all-white juries—even after one of the accusers admitted her allegation was a lie—for years.
Robert Parry at
Consortium News writes—
The Right’s Misconstrued Constitution:
The five right-wingers on the U.S. Supreme Court may soon recognize the “religious freedom” of corporations so that these artificial constructs can then dictate to female human citizens restrictions on the kinds of contraceptives that they can get through their work-place health insurance plans. [...]
We’ll get a better sense of whether the Five—Justices John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—will make their next leap of logic when the case gets to oral arguments. But whatever the Five do, you can count on them wrapping their reasoning in their claims to be devotees of an “originalist” view of the U.S. Constitution or as “strict constructionists.”
The reality, though, is that the Five’s modus operandi is to reach an ideological conclusion about what they want to do based on their political opinions or partisan needs and then find some legal-sounding language to wrap around the ruling.
See, for instance, their reasoning for gutting the Voting Rights Act, despite the Constitution’s Fifteenth Amendment explicitly authorizing Congress to take action it deems necessary to ensure the voting rights of racial minorities. Somehow the Five intuited an overpowering right of the states not to have their discriminatory behavior so constrained, all the better for Republicans and right-wingers to win elections.
Carl Davidson at
In These Times writes—
If Occupy Is a Battle, the First Round Was a Success:
[22-year-old Occupy activist] Matthew Richard’s essay on Occupy was, for me, a trip back in time, to my rebel youth, nearly 50 years ago. In his voice, I heard the full range of my own ideas and feelings from those “glory days.” In the 1,000 battles I’ve been through since then, I’ve tempered, reframed and even changed some of those views. It would be easy enough for me, in commenting on the essay, to slip into the role of wise old grio. But that’s not what I want. So I offer a few remarks from a different role, that of “co-conspirator.” I made it to Zuccotti Park and a dozen other encampments, too.
First, I don’t think Occupy failed, or has even disappeared. But to understand why, you first have to grasp what it was.
Occupy was largely an elemental rising of the “precariat,” today’s new working class, a distressed young generation burdened with debt and facing a precarious future of frequent joblessness in a wider order of savage inequalities. They had the audacity to choose the right target, Wall Street. They had the wisdom to seek allies, the 99% vs. the 1%. For at least a year, they changed the national conversation and spotlighted the main enemy.
Joe Firestone at
New Economic Perspectives writes—
Are Deaths Due to Lack of Health Insurance Seriously Underestimated?
Lately, I’ve had the feeling that “progressive” journalists and commentators too often pull their punches in calling attention to social problems, by underestimating the magnitude of problem-related statistics such as the unemployment rate and the number of fatalities due to lack of health insurance in the United States. My theory about this is that “progressives” are being defensive in their approach and bending over backwards to give the right wing the benefit of the doubt by understating numbers out of an abundance of caution.
Joan Smith at
The Independent writes—
HIV-Aids has mutated into a disease of poverty:
The time when Aids was seen as a disease of gay men in affluent countries – and used as an excuse to launch shameful homophobic attacks – is long gone. It still affects people in developed countries, and approximately 100,000 individuals now live with HIV in the UK.
But HIV-Aids has reverted to a depressing norm, becoming a disease of poverty; of the estimated 35 million people living with HIV worldwide, 70 per cent are in sub-Saharan Africa. Most transmission there occurs within heterosexual relationships, including marriage and commercial sex. Some African countries, including Ghana and Malawi, have made significant progress in tackling Aids. But South Africa has the highest number of people with HIV in the world, with almost one in five of the population infected; among women aged 25 to 29, it is close to one in three.
Jim Hightower at
The Progressive writes —
J.P. Morgan: The Man and the Bank:
J.P. Morgan was recently socked in the wallet by financial regulators, who levied a fine of nearly a billion bucks against the Wall Street baron for massive illegalities.
Well, not a fine against John Pierpont Morgan, the man. This 19th century robber baron was born to a great banking fortune and, by hook and crook, leveraged it to become the "King of American Finance." During the Gilded Age, Morgan cornered the U.S. financial markets, gained monopoly ownership of railroads, amassed a vast supply of the nation's gold, and used his investment power to create US Steel and take control of that market.[...]
Moving the clock forward, we come to JPMorgan Chase, today's financial powerhouse bearing J.P.'s name. The bank also inherited his pattern of committing multiple illegalities—and walking away scot free. Oh sure, the bank was hit with that big fine, but not a single one of the top bankers who committed gross wrongdoing were charged or even fired—much less sent to jail.
Banks don't commit crimes. Bankers do. And they won't ever stop if they don't have to pay for their crimes.
The Editorial Board of Haaretz writes—
'Judaization' of the Galilee means racism:
Living in Israel are the members of two peoples, Jewish and Arab, majority and minority. All are citizens who must be treated equally. This basic truth, the cornerstone of any democratic regime, is being undermined yet again.
The World Zionist Organization’s Settlement Division, part of the executive branch of the government, is formulating a plan to “Judaize the Galilee” and create a “demographic balance” vis-à-vis the Arab population. Zafrir Rinat reported yesterday in Haaretz that the goal is to attract 100,000 new Jewish residents to the Galilee, with the objective, in the agency's words, of “giving expression to Israeli sovereignty through settlement activity.”
This program must be scrapped immediately. Israeli sovereignty over the Galilee is not being questioned in any way. Whether most of the residents are Jews or Arabs, every resident of the Galilee is a citizen of the state and must be treated as such. A state that encourages members of one people to settle in any region, while at the same time imposing harsh restrictions on the growth of the other, is acting in a racist manner. There is no other way to describe such behavior.