Thomas Edsall at The New York Times writes—How Did the Democrats Become Favorites of the Rich?
Democrats now depend as much on affluent voters as on low-income voters. Democrats represent a majority of the richest congressional districts, and the party’s elected officials are more responsive to the policy agenda of the well-to-do than to average voters. The party and its candidates have come to rely on the elite 0.01 percent of the voting age population for a quarter of their financial backing and on large donors for another quarter.
The gulf between the two parties on socially fraught issues like abortion, immigration, same-sex marriage and voting rights remains vast. On economic issues, however, the Democratic Party has inched closer to the policy positions of conservatives, stepping back from championing the needs of working men and women, of the unemployed and of the so-called underclass.
Dean Baker at
The Guardian writes—
Why is Donald Trump's tax plan ridiculed but the TPP deal gets a pass?
There was no shortage of economists who were prepared to ridicule Donald Trump’s claim that his tax cut proposal would lead to 6% annual GDP growth. But where are the economists who will ridicule the Obama administration’s claims that the this new trade deal will lead to more rapid growth? [...]
[E]fforts to analyze the impact of the TPP on growth have found little or no effect. An analysis by the United States Department of Agriculture found the impact would be negligible. An analysis by the Peterson Institute found that the cumulative gains after 12 years, when most of the trade deal’s impact will have been seen, were just 0.07%. A more recent study upped this to 0.4%.
The most optimistic of these estimates implies a boost to the annual growth rate of 0.03% points. If growth would have averaged 2.20% over the next decade without the TPP, the optimistic projections show growth averaging 2.23% annually due to the trade deal.
More pundit excerpts and links can be found below the fold.
Ben Adler at Grist writes—Why the Democratic Debate Should Focus on Climate Change:
In the first Republican debate, climate change wasn't discussed at all, and in the second it got just a few minutes out of three hours. Marco Rubio, echoed by Chris Christie, used the opportunity to argue against taking action to limit emissions using false talking points about the science, economics, and international politics of the issue. This is in keeping with the entire GOP field's tilt toward climate science denial and aversion to doing anything to combat or even prepare for climate change.
The Democratic debates present an opportunity to address the issue more seriously. The leading three Democratic candidates have all staked out relatively strong positions on climate change, although Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have yet to flesh out many crucial details. Clinton, also, has yet to convince many climate hawks that she will make a meaningful break from President Obama's policy of increasing domestic fossil fuel production. Martin O'Malley, the former governor of Maryland, has released the most comprehensive and ambitious climate change policy agenda thus far. He is also calling for the DNC to add more debates.
Matthew Bruenig at the
Los Angeles Times writes—
Let's give poor women a real choice on family planning:
You've probably read this sentence, or one like it, many times: If we want to fight poverty, we need to nudge poor women away from having children. It's an old social Darwinist line that's been rebooted lately by centrist thought-leaders such as Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution. But I have a better idea. If we want to fight poverty, we should provide a robust set of universal family welfare benefits so that even women with bad jobs can comfortably afford to have children. [...]
To truly make all family choices available, we need to ensure that both contraception and raising a child are affordable for everyone. For the affluent, there are no economic impediments to either having or not having a child. Giving poor women free contraception is said to extend to them the reproductive choices available to rich women, but this is obviously not true. After receiving free contraception, a poor woman has only one comfortable option available: to use contraception to avoid having a child. The rich woman's option of comfortably having children remains out of reach.
Frances Seymour at
The Guardian writes—
In the fight to stop climate change, forests are a vital weapon:
Last week, dozens of countries announced a late-breaking wave of commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions ahead of the climate change summit in Paris this November. While such pledges are welcome, they are not yet sufficient to avert catastrophic global warming. Tropical forests provide an opportunity to close the gap.
When tropical forests are cut and left to decay or are burned, as happened on an area almost twice the size of Costa Rica last year, the carbon stored in leaves, branches, trunks, roots and soil is released into the atmosphere. For many forest-rich developing countries, deforestation, not fossil fuel use, is the major source of emissions. If tropical deforestation were a country, it would rank somewhere between China and the European Union as a source of current annual greenhouse gas emissions. So halting deforestation would be a giant step toward taming climate change.
Rachel Riederer at
The New Republic writes—
How the Rich Profit from Natural Disasters:
Why do disasters seem to do most damage to the already poor and dispossessed? Partly, [John Mutter, author of Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make The Rich Richer And The Poor Even Poorer] points out, it is because poor people live in more dangerous areas and in more tenuous conditions: steep hillsides and shoddily constructed buildings. Partly, it is because of global inequalities of information—the geoscience and risk assessment relevant to natural disasters are largely carried out in richer, safer nations. There is, for example, only one seismologist in Haiti. This creates a dangerous paradox, writes Mutter: “scientists working in relatively safe places… know more about risks to poor countries than people in those countries know themselves.”
But existing inequalities, of housing or land quality or information, are only part of the story. Natural disasters, Mutter shows, often make inequality worse, but that process is no accident of nature. In the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, “destruction was indiscriminate; the homes of the rich and the homes of the poor were all targets.” But the homes of the poor were poorly constructed and much more vulnerable. [...]
Floods of donations poured into Haiti, donations that were “viewed as manna from heaven by the unscrupulous, a chance for new profits.” But how were these donations used? Mutter cites a report from the Center for Economic Policy and Research that showed that of the nearly 1500 contracts awarded as part of the Haitian relief project, only 23 went to Haitian companies. Haitian companies received only 2.5% of the $195 million; much of the rest went to US contractors based in and around Washington DC, often through no-bid contracts.
John Nichols at
The Nation writes—
The US Tells Other Countries to Respect Unions—Shouldn’t the US Do the Same?
Decades later, the United States continues to adhere to this view—at least officially. While the just-announced Trans-Pacific Partnership deal is flawed on many levels, it includes language that requires countries such as Vietnam to recognize and respect the right to form independent trade unions.
Yet, while the US government tells other countries to respect the right to organize unions and collectively bargain, those rights have been under assault here. And the assault does not just take place in states led by anti-labor zealots such as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker or Ohio Governor John Kasich. [...]
[Fired nurses union supporter Allysha] Almada appeared Tuesday afternoon with Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, and Congressman Mark Pocan, D-Wisconsin, who announced that they are introducing the Workplace Democracy Act, a measure designed to make it easier for workers to join a union and to engage in collective bargaining.
“The Workplace Democracy Act strengthens the middle class by restoring workers’ rights to bargain for better wages, benefits, and working conditions,” says Pocan. “One of the root causes of declining wages is that workers’ ability to join together and bargain for higher wages and better working conditions has been has been severely undermined. This bill would make it easier for workers to have a voice in the workplace, providing a bigger paycheck to middle class families trying to pay the mortgage and find a way to send their kids to college.”
Bill Boyarsky at
TruthDig writes—
The Grass Roots Are Getting Greener for Sanders, but Will They Wither?
While pundits and political insiders wait for Vice President Joe Biden to make up his mind and watch Hillary Clinton’s latest attempt to seem more likable, Sen. Bernie Sanders is steadily building a grass-roots organization determined to fight for his progressive ideas through Election Day and beyond. [...]
Other Sanders supporters also embrace the idea of an effort that could extend beyond Election Day. “I think that Bernie serves as a huge inspiration for students who have grown up in a world where they’ve been undercut time and time again due to corruption or incompetence and have grown accustomed to the feeling that their voice can’t do much for themselves,” Justen Teguh, a student at the University of California, San Diego, told me in an email. “He has a policy which is great for those attending college, yes, but he’s also been putting a lot of focus on the power that the people collectively have and our responsibility to use it.”
Harnessing that power during and after the election is the linchpin of the Sanders campaign. The Vermont senator feels Obama and his team blundered by letting its effective 2008 election campaign organization, with its huge lists of supporters, fall into neglect in the post-election period.
Chris Lehman at
In These Times writes—
How California Birthed the Modern Right Wing:
Conservative rule in America is by now so deep-seated that a veritable cottage industry has sprung up to explain its origins. By varying accounts, the modern Right’s resurgence has its roots in populist religious revivals, Cold War paranoia, racial scapegoating and the ongoing cultural backlash against the New Left. Taken together, they raise the question: What served as the mainspring force?
Kathryn S. Olmsted, a UC-Davis historian, furnishes an arresting, if partial, answer in Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism. In order to take hold, the American Right had to make the liberal bulwarks of modern American prosperity seem irredeemably creaky, corrupt and sinister. Olmsted focuses on the convergence of the Right’s defining traits—a small-government ideology of economic individualism, a mediagenic narrative of business victimology and a healthy dose of anti-collectivist paranoia—as they were mobilized at the height of the New Deal to battle an enemy that barely registered on the radar of American public opinion at the time: the scattered, multiracial, and grossly undercompensated farmworkers of the Golden State.
How this defining conflict came to pass is itself an instructive story in the limits of New Deal liberalism.
Katrina vanden Heuvel at
The Washington Post writes—
The war on Planned Parenthood:
Seeing the anti-choice crowd’s open misogyny, some might conclude, as Post reporter Sarah Kaplan wrote , that “the stormy sessions could help Planned Parenthood.” Progressives point to polls showing that 61 percent of Americans support federal funding for Planned Parenthood (only 29 percent support the Republican Party). They recall the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation’s ill-fated 2012 attempt to defund Planned Parenthood, which backfired and resulted in $3 million in donations and an outpouring of support for Planned Parenthood. Heck, Politico reports that Hillary Clinton’s campaign is “eager for [a] Planned Parenthood fight with GOP.”
But this is a dangerous view. What really demands attention are the lives currently hanging in the balance. Since 2011, states have enacted an astonishing 287 new restrictions on abortion access. One-and-a-half abortion clinics are closing every week. Last Wednesday, a Planned Parenthood clinic near Los Angeles was deliberately set on fire.