Andrew Leonard - Joseph Stiglitz: “Romney’s Plan is Based on Magic”

Joseph Stiglitz has a decent résumé. He won the Nobel Prize in economics and served as chairman of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers before being named chief economist of the World Bank. His C.V. , however, pales before his passionate commitment to pushing for economic policies that help the poor and powerless — inside and out of the United States. For Stiglitz, economics and social justice can’t be separated.

Since the election of Barack Obama, Stiglitz has also been something of a thorn in the side of the current administration, consistently critiquing the White House for falling short. He wasted no time in pointing out that Obama’s stimulus was too weak and his housing policy woefully ineffective — and he’s been particularly biting on the topic of Obama’s subservience to banking interests. But with Election Day fast approaching, it’s always useful to look at what the other guys would do, instead. Stiglitz took some time out to explain to Salon why, when the topic is economy, there’s really no choice for progressives in this election.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/02-5

Ralph Nader - Waiting for Obama, Democrats Will Lose the House of Representatives

Will the Congressional Democrats recover the House of Representatives from the clutches of the cruelest, most corporately monetized, anti-people Republican Party since 1858? (see the House Democratic Caucus report) Amazingly, the answer, less than a week before the election, is no, according to veteran House Democrats, pollsters and the Washington D.C. punditry. In fact, that negative prediction has been consistent for at least 8 months.

Two more years of Reps. John Boehner, Eric Cantor and their gang blocking Barack Obama (if he gets elected), should he want to champion any significant legislation. Why can’t the Democrats landslide these Republicans as FDR, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson would surely have done?

The answers lie in the grotesque unmentioned ways that the incumbent Democrats have tied themselves up in knots that spell centralized paralysis. The following highlights how they have made themselves dysfunctional.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/02-1

Amitabh Pal - Romney's Extremist Foreign Policy

Which Mitt Romney will we see on foreign policy, if he’s elected? The slightly right of center cautious international consensus builder? Or the reckless neocon sock puppet? These questions have been nagging me for the past couple of months, but I think I’ve found the answer.

It’s much more likely that a Romney Administration will be marked by a belligerent attitude toward the rest of the world—a “my way or the highway” approach that blighted the tenure of the previous Republican to occupy the Oval Office.

Romney did a really good job of posturing as a reasonable guy in the foreign policy debate in order to assure the undecideds that he wasn’t a far-right wacko. On Israel/Palestine and Iran, his approach was virtually indistinguishable from President Obama’s. And he was surprisingly conciliatory on Pakistan, asserting that the United States had to work with the country’s security establishment, in spite of its troubling history.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/02-4

Greg Kaufmann - Romney Declines as Obama Answers Poverty Questions

Three months ago, anticipating that the media and presidential campaigns wouldn’t focus on the struggles of the poor and near poor in a substantive way, TheNation.com kicked off a new campaign: “#TalkPoverty: Questions for Obama and Romney.”

In an effort to push the issue of poverty into the mainstream political debate, I profiled and polled five experts who have devoted their lives to fighting poverty—and individuals who have lived in poverty—giving them the opportunity to ask the presidential candidates the questions that they want answers to.

A thriving #TalkPoverty community developed online, and the Half In Ten coalition—comprised of 200 national and local organizations across the country—ran an excellent spin-off campaign to pressure debate moderators to ask President Obama and Governor Romney about their plans to address child poverty. Despite this vibrant campaign—and the outsized focus of the debates on the domestic economy—the moderators never asked a single question about poverty.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/02-2

Matt Taibbi - Hurricane Sandy and the Myth of the Big Government-vs.-Small-Government Debate

Quite a shock the other day to look out my window in Jersey City, and see the Hudson River rushing over what used to be the street in front of my building. For nearly three days my dog and I played Robinson Crusoe and Friday, sleepily watching from our little apartment-island while we waited for hot water, cell service, the internet, even elevators to come back on line.President Barack Obama speaks as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie looks on as they visit a shelter for Hurricane Sandy victims in Brigantine, New Jersey, on October 31th, 2012.

When I finally got back on the internet and was able to read the news again, I saw that Hurricane Sandy, in addition to being the rare storm to live up to its televised hype, had turned into the last-minute curveball plot twist that always seems to pop up in presidential races.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/01-6

Nicholas Kristof - Will Climate Get Some Respect Now?

President Obama and Mitt Romney seemed determined not to discuss climate change in this campaign. So thanks to Hurricane Sandy for forcing the issue: Isn’t it time to talk not only about weather, but also about climate?

It’s true, of course, that no single storm or drought can be attributed to climate change. Atlantic hurricanes in the Northeast go way back, as the catastrophic “snow hurricane” of 1804 attests. But many scientists believe that rising carbon emissions could make extreme weather — like Sandy — more likely.

“You can’t say any one single event is reflective of climate change,” William Solecki, the co-chairman of the New York City Panel on Climate Change, told me. “But it’s illustrative of the conditions and events and scenarios that we expect with climate change.”

In that sense, whatever its causes, Sandy offers a window into the way ahead.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/01-3

Bill McKibben - Sandy Forces Climate Change on US Election Despite Fossil Fuel Lobby

Here's a sentence I wish I hadn't written – it rolled out of my Macbook in May, part of an article for Rolling Stone that quickly went viral:Currie Wagner looks over the debris from his grandmother Betty Wagner's house, destroyed by Sandy, in New Jersey. (Photograph: Julio Cortez/AP)

"Say something so big finally happens (a giant hurricane swamps Manhattan, a megadrought wipes out Midwest agriculture) that even the political power of the industry is inadequate to restrain legislators, who manage to regulate carbon."

I wish I hadn't written it because the first half gives me entirely undeserved credit for prescience: I had no idea both would, in fact, happen in the next six months. And I wish I hadn't written it because now that my bluff's been called, I'm doubting that even Sandy, the largest storm ever, will be enough to make our political class serious about climate change.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/31-2

Lizz Winstead - Hey Super PACs, Superstorm Sandy Just Gave You a Great Cause for Your Millions

We are a week out from the presidential election. We have just had 60 million Americans affected by a hurricane. Super Pacs have billions of dollars just sitting lying around.

So, I have an idea.

Super Pacs, how about you force the candidates to spend the next week campaigning on their own and spend some of your limitless funds on the relief effort? It's a win-win for you any way you look at it.

First, for the Republican super pacs, you make Mitt Romney look good. Hell, you fulfill his dream! Remember, how he waxed on about dissolving the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), and even said:

"If we can send it back to the private sector, that's even better."

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/31-3

Greg Palast - Mitt Romney's Bailout Bonanza

This investigation was supported by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute and by the Puffin Foundation. Elements of it appear in Palast’s new book, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps (Seven Stories). Research assistance by Zach D. Roberts, Ari Paul, Nader Atassi and Eric Wuestewald.
 
Mitt Romney’s opposition to the auto bailout has haunted him on the campaign trail, especially in Rust Belt states like Ohio. There, in September, the Obama campaign launched television ads blasting Romney’s November 2008 New York Times op-ed, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” But Romney has done a good job of concealing, until now, the fact that he and his wife, Ann, personally gained at least $15.3 million from the bailout—and a few of Romney’s most important Wall Street donors made more than $4 billion. Their gains, and the Romneys’, were astronomical—more than 3,000 percent on their investment.

It all starts with Delphi Automotive, a former General Motors subsidiary whose auto parts remain essential to GM’s production lines. No bailout of GM—or Chrysler, for that matter—could have been successful without saving Delphi. So, in addition to making massive loans to automakers in 2009, the federal government sent, directly or indirectly, more than $12.9 billion to Delphi—and to the hedge funds that had gained control over it.

Read More:

http://www.thenation.com/article/170644/mitt-romneys-bailout-bonanza

Mr. Fish - Paul Krassner: The Politics of Being a Smartass

Paul Krassner, a founding member of the Yippies, a Merry Prankster and the editor of what writer Terry Southern said was “the first American publication to really tell the truth,” The Realist, has been called the father of the underground press. He has also been called a lousy motherfucker by his establishment detractors, an addendum that, if true, calls into question the genetic integrity of the children that he is purported to have fathered, which are typically depicted as cross-eyed and babbling and groping at their groins in total disregard for whoever might be watching. Of course, when it comes to creation myths all over the world and the grotesquely unflattering depictions of every mother made to appear in each—whether they are virgins, a discarded rib or a duplicitous and distrustful moon—most people are encouraged by Krassner’s relentlessly infectious curiosity about how and why the American culture dysfunctions so well, so much so that they are more than willing to ignore the details of the underground press’ inception and to simply marvel at the multitudinousness of the father’s offspring.

Read More:

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/paul_krassner_the_politics_of_being_a_smartass_20121017/