The Commentariat -- December 6
New York Times: "The chairman, , said in an interview broadcast on Sunday evening that rising inequality was eroding social cohesion and that Congress could help economic growth by making the tax code more efficient." Bloomberg story here. Here's the video:
Julie Pace & Ken Thomas of ABC News, December 4: "The White House says the Korean agreement could put as many as 70,000 Americans to work...." CW: I'm pretty sure I repeated this assertion somewhere ...
... BUT Paul Krugman says trade deals do not produce jobs. He even provides a fancy formula -- which I don't understand -- to explain why. If you also don't quite get it, here's a good rule to apply: a sentence that begins "The White House says" is less likely to be true than one that begins "Paul Krugman says."
There is a war ... in this country..., a war being waged by some of the wealthiest & more powerful people in this country against the working families of the United States of America, against the disappearing & shrinking middle class of our country.
-- Sen. Bernie Sanders ...
Chicken Crap? Jay Newton-Small of Time thinks Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is crowing before he counts his chickens. ...
... Howard Fineman: "While the public focus of the Great Tax Battle remains riveted on the U.S. Senate, top Democratic insiders are privately worried about the real lame-duck end game: a last-minute, potentially deal-breaking revolt by Democrats in the House." CW: I hope the House Dems do revolt; the capitulation to the rich is revolting. ...
... Jonathan Chait of The New Republic: "So now that President Obama has given up on his campaign pledge of ending the Bush tax cuts on income over $250,000, what is Plan B?" (a) Get re-elected. (b) assuming he does win, he'll be in much stronger position on taxes two years from now.... Eliminating the Bush tax cuts would reduce the deficit by $4.6 trillion over ten years, considerably more than the $3.8 trillion that the Bowles-Simpson plan would save." ...
... Paul Krugman: "Democrats should not give in to Republican blackmail on extending tax cuts." ...
... Oh, the Worries of the Rich. Louise Story & Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times: "Worried that lawmakers will allow taxes to rise for the wealthiest Americans beginning next year, financial firms are discussing whether to move up their bonus payouts from next year to this month.... If Congress does not extend the for the highest income levels, a typical worker who earns a $1 million bonus would pay $40,000 to $50,000 more in taxes next year than this year, depending on base salary." ...
... Matt Yglesias: "Even though Social Security is only a very mildly redistributive program, inequality of wealth is such that it’s a vital element of the bottom 60 percent’s living standards but kind of small beer to the top twenty percent":
New York Times Editors: "Schwarzenegger v. Plata ... is the most important case in years about prison conditions. The [Supreme Court] justices should uphold the lower court’s remedy for addressing the horrors." ...
... AND Times Editors: the Senate Ethics Committee must make "a decisive report" or take "disciplinary action" against Sen. John Ensign, "since the facts suggest the use of both influence and money to hush up the affair" he had with an aide.
Sunday Times, via Fox News: "Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has circulated across the internet an encrypted 'poison pill' cache of uncensored documents suspected to include files on BP and Guantanamo Bay. One of the files identified this weekend by The Sunday Times — called the 'insurance' file — has been downloaded from the WikiLeaks website by tens of thousands of supporters, from America to Australia. Assange warns that any government that tries to curtail his activities risks triggering a new deluge of state and commercial secrets." ...
... CBS News: "WikiLeaks has been condemned by British and U.S. officials for publishing a secret State Department inventory of sites across the world deemed vital to American security. The document, dubbed the Critical Foreign Dependencies Initiative according to a report in The Telegraph, lists everything from British pharmaceutical factories churning out vaccines and insulin, to a Bauxite mine in the African nation of Guinea." ...
... Ed O'Keefe of the Washington Post: "Obama administration officials reminded rank-and-file federal workers and contractors late Friday to steer clear of WikiLeaks, the controversial document-sharing Web site." ...
Judy Woodruff's interview of former national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski & Stephen Hadley is a week old, but it's still worth hearing:
... The transcript is here. ...
... Andy Borowitz Scoop: "WikiLeaks Attempts to Expose Palin's Thoughts, Finds Nothing":
For her part, Gov. Palin seemed to be relishing her role as the one politician in the world who has nothing to fear from WikiLeaks. On Twitter, she addressed the following message to Mr. Assange: 'How’s that Wiki-Leaky thing workin out for ya?' ...
... If you're interested in knowing how Julian Assange thinks & why he's doing what he's doing, here are links to pdfs of a couple of his, well, position papers. The first is titled, "State & Terrorist Conspiracies"; the second is "Conspiracy as Governance." Assange distributed both in late 2006. If you want a short course, Michael Collins, writing on AlterNet, has an overview, tho I think he misunderstands Assange's comment about 9/11. Warning: maybe if you're planning a diplomatic career, you should stay away from this stuff.
Welcome to America. Holbrook Mohr, et al. of the AP: "Lured by unsupervised, third-party brokers with promises of steady jobs and a chance to sightsee, some foreign college students on summer work programs in the U.S. get a far different taste of life in America. An Associated Press investigation found students forced to work in strip clubs instead of restaurants. Others take home $1 an hour or even less. Some live in apartments so crowded that they sleep in shifts because there aren't enough beds. Others have to eat on floors. They are among more than 100,000 college students who come to the U.S. each year on popular J-1 visas, which supply resorts with cheap seasonal labor as part of a program aimed at fostering cultural understanding." ...
... Tougher by the Numbers. Andrew Becker of the Washington Post: "For much of this year, the Obama administration touted its tougher-than-ever approach to immigration enforcement, culminating in a record number of deportations. But in reaching 392,862 deportations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement included more than 19,000 immigrants who had exited the previous fiscal year. When ICE officials realized in the final weeks of the fiscal year..., that the agency still was in jeopardy of falling short of last year's mark..., officials quietly directed immigration officers to bypass backlogged immigration courts and time-consuming deportation hearings whenever possible...."
Illustration by Tomer Hanuka for New York Magazine.New York Magazine: "Ten years ago this month, a Supreme Court ruling ushered in George W. Bush as our 43rd president. We asked five (sometime) novelists to imagine the past decade as if the election had gone the other way. America: This is your parallel life." The five writers are Kurt Andersen, Kevin Baker, Glenn Beck!, Jane Smiley & Walter Kirn.
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