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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Michael Carmichael - The Romney- Ryan Ticket: Running the Radical Republican Right-Wing

Shocked by the latest poll numbers showing that he trails Obama by 7 points and stunned by the fact that the American people demand to see his tax returns for multiple zero tax years, Mitt Romney needed to come up with something fast to distract the incessant media barrage besieging his faltering campaign for president.

After a devastating trip abroad that led to a Niagara of negative ink about a lengthy concatenation of diplomatic blunders from London to Jerusalem to Poland, Romney has tried just about everything his puny mind can conceive to distract the public from his business record, his taxes and Bain Capital.

However, the month of August presented Romney with two tactical opportunities to evade (at least momentarily) the insatiable onslaught of the probing media.

First and foremost, Romney had the option of naming his Vice Presidential running mate.  Secondly, Romney will be featured as the Guest of Honor at what promises to be one of the most dreadful spectacles the world has ever seen:  the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida later this month.  With Romney’s luck, this convention will be tantamount to a public lynching, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.

To erect a shield to provide a partial screen of defense from the ceaseless media attacks bombarding him and his frazzled staff, Romney finally selected a running mate whose economic views uncannily mirror his own for the privatization of government.  In order to re-enforce his core philosophy of the divine right of corporate and plutocratic financial supremacy, Romney has turned to Paul Ryan of Wisconsin’s 1^st District that encompasses the swish metropolitan areas of Kenosha, Racine, Muskego and the Congressman’s hometown of Janesville.

On the 29^th of January 1970, Paul Davis Ryan was born the youngest of four children of his Irish-German Roman Catholic parents.  In his youth, Ryan enjoyed the out-of-doors activities of skiing, hiking and camping in the Colorado Rockies.  While attending Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Ryan worked as a counselor at a summer camp until he landed the prestigious position as a “Hotdogger” for the Oscar Mayer Wiener Company, a job that permitted him to wheel around Ohio and Wisconsin in the now world famous Wienermobile promoting the sales of hot dogs, bacon and over twenty-five kinds of ‘lunchable’ meats including:  bologna (aka:  “baloney”).

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http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32308

Peter Phillips - Desperate Times Demand Revolutionary Measures

"Don't waste any more time or energy on the presidential election than it takes to get to your polling station and pull a lever for a third-party candidate---just enough to register your obstruction and defiance--and then get back out onto the street. That is where the question of real power is being decided." Chris Hedges, May 2012

Runway capitalism is moving unrelentingly towards sociopolitical-environmental collapse--cheered on by a two-headed single party machine known as US Congress. Activists, who see the coming disasters as catastrophic, are seeking revolutionary change through non-cooperation, and occupy disruptions. Yet, many are the still delusional hopefuls desperately fumbling with traditional responses; including "Kum ba yah" marches, and the futile support for progressive left-leaning candidates seeking positions of influence inside the Washington beltway. 

Do we understand that habeas corpus is no longer a legal protection in the US or that the US president can torture and kill American citizens, let along anyone in the world? How can we ignore the inconvenient truths of warrentless wire taps and electronic monitoring for everyone? Why do we tolerate that US-NATO forces killing people in over one hundred countries in the world using special service operatives, private assassins and drones--a million civilians deaths in Iraq alone? How can we be so blind as not to see our corporate media is a propaganda fog machine for the one percent?  These questions, reflecting the reality of America today, are so far from the values of our traditions that accepting any aspect of authority from Washington DC is a sacrilege to our honor. We are in desperate times. 

In Congress, wealth begets membership, and wealth is the reward for correct action. The members in the House and Senate have a collective net worth of $2.04 billion, up from $1.65 billion, in 2008.  While at the same time, Americans' household net worth has continued to declined and the number of people living in poverty has risen for the fifth year in a row. 

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http://www.opednews.com/articles/Desperate-Times-Demand-Rev-by-Peter-Phillips-120514-183.html

Brentin Mock - Five Million Voters May Lose Rights in the 2012 Elections

Today’s Super Tuesday primary involves 10 states and 437 delegates at stake for the Republican Party’s presidential prospects. There are two states among that crop that are worth taking a look at: Georgia and Tennessee. Both are emblems for a growing, and troubling, legislative trend in which new election laws mandate citizens to produce photo identification to vote, ask people to prove their citizenship to vote, or outright curtail voter registration efforts.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as many as five million eligible voters could meet difficulties this Election Day due to these new, imposing voter laws.

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http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/03/voter_id_card.html

Ari Berman - Why the Koch Brothers and ALEC Don’t Want You to Vote

By Ari Berman

NationofChange

http://www.nationofchange.org/why-koch-brothers-and-alec-don-t-want-you-vote-1320850888

Today residents of Mississippi will decide whether voters must produce a government-issued ID in order to cast a ballot and voters in Maine will choose whether to keep or overturn a new law banning election day voter registration, which had previously been on the books since 1973.

These votes occur amidst the backdrop of an unprecedented, Republican-led war on voting. Since the 2010 election, at least a dozen states controlled by Republicans have approved new obstacles to voting—mandating government-issued IDs, curtailing early voting, restricting voter registration, disenfranchising ex-felons. Five million voters could be negatively impacted by the new laws, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, which found that “these new restrictions fall most heavily on young, minority and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities”—in other words, those most likely to vote for Democrats.

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"Ralph Nader" - Obama Must Face Meaningful Democratic Primaries

America's two-party dictatorship – a model unknown in any other western country – keeps reinventing the ways it closes doors not just on third party candidates but on any challenges to their incumbent presidents within the party's primaries. Now, it is the turn of the Democrats to make a mockery out of the first amendment rights of others to speak, assemble and petition their government by running inside the upcoming presidential primary season that runs from January to June 2012. After President Obama took his liberal/progressive base for so many one-sided corporatist rides in his administration, he and his allies are very determined to give him a free ride by having him campaign around the country on Air Force One as an unchallenged, one-man primary.

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"Dave Murphy" - Politics, Farmers and Change: The End of Rural America

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/19-6

Published on Friday, August 19, 2011 by The Huffington Post

by Dave Murphy

This week President Obama returned to Iowa, where he launched his successful bid to the White House, to speak about "jobs and economic security" in rural America. According to the White House, his bus tour is not a campaign trip, but veteran political observers would disagree. For farmers and rural advocates this tour is really about something much larger than electioneering or a new jobs program, it's about the survival of rural America.

While the plight of urban decay has been widely publicized in the mainstream press, similar issues facing our country cousins (myself included), lack of well paying jobs, rural brain drain, food deserts, poverty and lack of access to quality health care, have either been ignored or largely misunderstood by policy makers and the press. Today, more rural Americans are on food stamps and face bleaker economic prospects than their urban counterparts, despite the romantic image of small town life often portrayed by the media.

For the past 50 years, rural America has seen it's best, brightest and most mobile flee the countryside in search of jobs as federal farm, economic and trade policies have slowly bled family farmers off the land. Since 1960, when John F. Kennedy was elected, America has lost over 1.7 million family farms, the backbone of rural economies, with the number of farmers in the U.S. today being outnumbered by prisoners.

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‘The Left Has Nowhere to Go’

Ralph Nader in a CNN poll a few days before the 2008 presidential election had an estimated 3 percent of the electorate, or about 4 million people, behind his candidacy. But once the votes were counted, his support dwindled to a little over 700,000. Nader believes that many of his supporters entered the polling booth and could not bring themselves to challenge the Democrats and Barack Obama. I suspect Nader is right. And this retreat is another example of the lack of nerve we must overcome if we are going to battle back against the corporate state. A vote for Nader or Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney in 2008 was an act of defiance. A vote for Obama and the Democrats was an act of submission. We cannot afford to be submissive anymore.

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