At The Intercept, Jenna McLaughlin writes—Hasty, Fearful Passage of Cybersecurity Bill Recalls Patriot Act:
Congress easily passed a thinly disguised surveillance provision — the final version of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA — on Friday; it was shoehorned into a must-pass budget bill to prevent a government shutdown before the holidays.
Born of a climate of fear combined with a sense of urgency, the bill claims to do one thing — help companies share information with the government to heed off cyber attacks — and does entirely another, increasing the U.S. government’s spying powers while letting companies with poor cyber hygiene off the hook. It’s likely to spawn unintended consequences.
At The Guardian, Kshama Sawant, the socialist Seattle city councilwoman, writes—Of course 'socialism' was most-searched term of 2015: its ideas fit our times:
There is a decisive mood of resistance in America – a backlash to the status quo. The Bernie Sanders campaign for president is capturing that mood, and it is no surprise that ‘socialism’ was the most looked-up word in 2015.
The American youth of today did not grow up in the shadow of the Cold War. The vilification of socialist ideas by Republicans anyway only serves, if anything, to pique their interest. Coupled with that is the future most young Americans face: a low-wage job market, proliferation of student debt and an escalating housing affordability crisis. Since the Occupy movement, the dirty word as far as many millennials are concerned is not socialism, but capitalism. [...]
Our city council re-election victory in Seattle, Washington, this fall is a powerful indicator of the prevailing mood. The first time our Socialist Alternative Party won, in 2013, the political and business establishment did not take us seriously. But we have shown that not only can a socialist win in the US, a socialist can drive the political agenda of a major city. This time around, big business and their political representatives mobilized a massive campaign against us, fueled with large amounts of corporate cash, disingenuous attack mailers, red baiting and red herrings.
Despite the fact that most Democratic party leaders backed my opponent, the majority of ordinary people who consider themselves
Democrats supported my openly socialist campaign. We won decisively with 56% of the vote. We set a new record by raising nearly half a million dollars—none of it corporate cash—with a median contribution of $50.
At The New York Times, Paul Krugman writes—The Donald and the Decider:
So Donald Trump as a political phenomenon is very much in a line of succession that runs from W. through Mrs. Palin, and in many ways he’s entirely representative of the Republican mainstream. For example, were you shocked when Mr. Trump revealed his admiration for Vladimir Putin? He was only articulating a feeling that was already widespread in his party.
Meanwhile, what do the establishment candidates have to offer as an alternative? On policy substance, not much. Remember, back when he was the presumed front-runner, Jeb Bush assembled a team of foreign-policy “experts,” people who had academic credentials and chairs at right-wing think tanks. But the team was dominated by neoconservative hard-liners, people committed, despite past failures, to the belief that shock and awe solve all problems.
In other words, Mr. Bush wasn’t articulating a notably different policy than what we’re now hearing from Trump et al; all he offered was belligerence with a thin veneer of respectability. Marco Rubio, who has succeeded him as the establishment favorite, is much the same, with a few added evasions. Why should anyone be surprised to see this posturing, er, trumped by the unapologetic belligerence offered by nonestablishment candidates?
At The Guardian, Mark Ruffalo writes—It's time to transition to 100% clean energy: the wind is now at our backs:
In many ways, the Paris deal is the mother of all market signals. To deliver on the promises world leaders made, we will need to leave coal and oil in the ground and move toward a complete reliance on clean energy. Let’s not miss the writing on the wall: fossil fuels are a losing bet, while renewables offer economic opportunity.
This is true for all segments of society – from energy investors to individual households that can save money on their energy bills by switching to rooftop solar power.
The Paris pact ratifies an ongoing renewable energy revolution spreading across the globe. Each year since 2013, the world has added more power-generating capacity fueled by renewable sources than from coal, natural gas and oil combined. Global investment in renewable energy hit $310bn last year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. And major companies are pledging to go 100% renewable, too.
Much of that growth in clean, renewable energy has come from the subnational movement, in which cities, states and regions are banding together and leading even if their national governments are lagging. This bottom-up approach – one that so many people around the world are already part of – is what was most alive about Paris.
At the Los Angeles Times, Doyle McManus writes—Ted Cruz's slippery sales pitch for a tax overhaul:
Cruz has suggested replacing the federal income tax with a 10% flat tax. Everyone, rich and poor, would pay the same rate. [...]
Cruz's plan would deliver most of its benefits to the wealthy. High-income taxpayers who currently pay taxes at rates up to 39.6% would get a windfall. Middle-income taxpayers might see their tax bills reduced about 1.5%. This is not a middle-class tax cut.
And the Cruz plan would blow a giant hole in the federal budget. The Tax Foundation, a conservative group that supports lower tax rates, estimates that Cruz's income tax would subtract more than $11 trillion in revenue over 10 years.
At In These Times, David Moberg writes—8 Terrible Things About the Trans-Pacific Partnership:
In October, President Obama hailed the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as “the most progressive trade deal in history.”
But progressive public-interest organizations say that the final text, the fruit of seven years of secretive trade talks between the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries, dashed even their low expectations. The deal not only continues most of the troubling features of trade agreements since NAFTA but also breaks worrisome new ground.
Like most recent international economic agreements, the TPP only glancingly resembles a classic trade deal, concerned mainly with tariffs and quotas. Rather, like the WTO agreements or NAFTA, it is an attempt to set the rules of the global economy to favor multinational corporations over everything else, trampling on democracy, national sovereignty and the public good. The more than 600 corporate lobbyists who had access to the draft texts used their insider status to shape the deal, while labor unions, environmentalists and others offered testimony from outside, with little impact.
At The New York Times, Donovan X. Ramsay writes—The Missing Black Millennials:
Black millennials are unlike any other generation of black voters the Democratic Party has had to court. Born roughly two decades after the biggest wins of the civil rights movement, we’ve experienced both its benefits and failures. We grew up in neighborhoods and matriculated at schools that were resegregated. And while many of us participated in the election of the nation’s first black president, we’ve witnessed what feels like his inability to adequately serve black Americans in the face of continued economic challenges and systematic police brutality. As a result, we are not satisfied with the Democratic Party’s mere acknowledgment of our issues, nor are we charmed by their willingness to appear in black churches.
Like all other constituents, we need to be targeted and convinced. So far, the candidates have spent far too little time debating the policies that shape racial justice. At the top of 2016 they have a chance, with a debate sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus in which they should focus less on movements of the past and more on the one in front of them.
To be fair, the leading Democratic presidential campaigns seem to be learning from the Black Lives Matter movement. Between June and the first Democratic debate in October, Mrs. Clinton evolved from saying “all lives matter” at a black church outside of Ferguson to meeting privately with Black Lives Matter groups and elevating criminal justice reform in her platform.
Mr. Sanders has arguably shown the most growth. Since being confronted by Black Lives Matter protesters at the Netroots Nation conference in July, he has met privately with activists and published a racial justice agendathat addresses issues of economic, legal, political and physical violence against people of color.
The editors of The Progressive write—The Real Rift in the Democratic Debate:
The best moment of the debate came when Sanders, channeling FDR, welcomed the hatred of big corporations and Wall Street.
The moderator had asked Hillary if, as a Fortune Magazine headline put it, “business loves Hillary.”
“Everybody should,” she shot back—a perfect political answer.
The moderator put the same question to Sanders” “Will corporate America love a President Sanders?”
“No, I think they won’t.” Sanders replied simply.
“So Hillary and I have a difference,” he continued. “The CEOs of large multinationals may like Hillary. They ain’t going to like me and Wall Street is going to like me even less.”
“The greed of Wall Street is destroying this economy,” Sanders added. [...]
The preposterous Washington consensus that you can be loved by Wall Street and, at the same time, serve the interests of ordinary citizens, is crumbling. So is the American myth of a classless society where everyone can get rich and we all play by the same rules.
At The Washington Post, E.J. Dionne Jr. writes—Democrats embrace modern America as Republicans reject it:
Which political party loves America? Not the United States that once existed, but the flesh-and-blood nation that we live in now.
The debates we have witnessed — too few and far between for the Democrats, frequent enough for the Republicans to constitute a new reality TV show — have provided an incontestable answer to that question.
The Democrats embrace the United States of Now in all of its raucous diversity.
Democrats are not free of nostalgia. They long for the more economically equal America of decades ago and celebrate liberalism’s heydays during the New Deal and civil rights years.
At New York Magazine, Rebecca Traister called the behavior of the moderators “maddening” in her critique—The 3rd Democratic Debate Showed the Candidates at Their Best, Until the Moderators Got in the Way:
This is the third debate in which there have been no questions acknowledging the national crisis in reproductive care; tonight, as in the other debates, Clinton reflexively mentioned efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, and Sanders briefly acknowledged the mass shooting that recently took place at a Planned Parenthood clinic.
But instead of making inquiries about anything so real as limited access to abortion and birth control services, especially for poor women and women of color, Raddatz made the mind-boggling choice to ask about the candidates’ spouses, beginning, of course, with Hillary. Since First Ladies have traditionally played hostess and dealt with domestic responsibilities, Raddatz began — in what felt like a slow-motion car crash of a query — what role would Clinton’s husband Bill play?
The degree to which this question sucked is hard to describe
At The Nation, Joshua Kornbluh writes— Why US-Cuba Normalization Is Accelerating:
Predictably, Cuba policy has become a lightning rod in the 2016 presidential campaign. Ted Cruz, the Cuban-American senator who has surged to the head of the GOP pack in Iowa, has dismissed Obama’s efforts at normalization as “unconditional surrender.” Another Cuban-American candidate, Senator Marco Rubio, has vowed “to unravel as many of these changes as possible.” A Rubio ally, Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, is attempting to quietly insert language into House spending bills that, if accepted, would hamstring further normalization.
But proponents of normal relations, including such veteran advocacy groups as the Washington Office on Latin America and the Center for Democracy in the Americas—along with new business-oriented lobbying groups like #CubaNow, the US Agriculture Coalition for Cuba and the US Chamber of Commerce’s US-Cuba Business Council—remain optimistic. Advocates are supporting the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act, introduced by Republican Senator Jeff Flake, and the Freedom to Export to Cuba Act, sponsored by Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, which would largely eliminate the embargo. “This is irreversible,” predicts James Williams, who directs Engage Cuba, a business NGO dedicated to normalization.