Even as the Olympics began ramping up last week, that big event pushed other stories out of the headlines, much like the daylong correction and apologies of many media organizations surrounding the right-wing lies about the CBO report on Obamacare.
In all the distractions, much of the greater media also missed key stories about immigration and the farm bill that came down last week. Greg Sargent, as he often does, had a fantastic roundup Friday of the issues surrounding immigration reform - and we highly recommend you read his work on the subject, and all the pieces he recommended as well.
The Farm & Food bill that President Obama signed into law on Friday received no similar wide-angle roundup from anyone - sadly, not a surprise in today's media environment. So we rounded up some of the best explanations about the bill, that's now law.
Brad Plumer summarized the bill in a great chart two weeks ago, making it instantly clear where the $956 billion in funding went. As Plumer also noted last week, many people - both inside and outside of Congress - hated the bill. David Dayen made brutally clear that the Farm & Food bill once again gave wads of cash to agribusness. Congress just gave the money away in a sneakier way. Meanwhile, the "compromise" on food stamps wasn't really a compromise at all. As Ned Resnikoff made clear, Congress didn't compromise between raising or lowering the amount of help poor Americans would get on food issues. The only "compromise" members of Congress made was in how much they pandered to the extremists on the right and to big ag - and how badly they were going to screw over the poor.
The bill wasn't as bad as it could have been, though, and after almost three years of fighting over how generously they were going to reward the rich agribusnesses, and screw the poor, both the House and Senate passed the bill, and President Obama signed it into law last Friday.
It should be noted that even in the midst of bad weather and other commitments, for better or worse, several powerful Democrats - some up for re-election this year - stood with President Obama as he signed the Farm Bill. Meanwhile, Republican members of Congress, who will most assuredly take credit for the parts of the bill that rewarded their corporate donors, didn't have the courage to stand with the President as he signed the bill they helped to pass.
If a bill - now a law - like this makes you angry, we understand that feeling, and we empathize with you.
Billions of taxpayer dollars are unnecessarily going to whiny, ungrateful billionaires who have been perpetually claiming they work harder than 99% of Americans, thanks in part to this Farm & Food law. Meanwhile, millions of Americans who've been desperately searching for jobs that simply don't exist have been ignored on both unemployment and now again on food assistance.
There are many reasons for this failure, one of which is that poor Americans of all kinds - along with women, minorities, and left-leaning political groups and SuperPACs - have for far too long sat out the midterm elections in this country. Whether it's because of the two or three jobs they're working, or because the members of those left-leaning political groups got their political panties in a bunch because President Obama couldn't precisely control the outcome of any number of bills that 535 members of Congress sent him, or because of simple tribalism, those voters stayed home in 2010. As we all know now, that allowed the obstructionist and insane tea party extremists to take over Congress - and do nothing ever since.
Unfortunately, it already looks like the biggest SuperPAC on the left, Priorities USA, has already decided to make this same mistake again, by staying completely out of the races in 2014. Apparently, they've decided to put all their money on the chance that Hillary Clinton can take it all in 2016. We don't think we need to remind anyone that the President isn't the Green Lantern, and he - or she - won't be able to do very much if they don't have a decent Congress, and decent progressive officials at the state and local levels.
That kind of failure and reluctance on the part of the 99% to get involved in politics, and stand up for their share of the Federal budget, has also continued to allow the rich and corporations to pick the choicest cuts off the budget, while those Americans most in need of help are still getting just the leftover scraps.
As long as any of the 99% stay on the sideline, scraps and bones is all the 1% will ever toss to us.
Monday, February 10, 2014
Friday, February 7, 2014
A Reason For Pipe Dreams
While Sochi, Russia may be a computer hacker's paradise, and many of its venues appear nowhere near ready for the crush of people already arriving from around the world, the 2014 Olympics has already begun in Russia, for better or worse.
For many years now, the Olympics have given our staff members a collective mix of both hope and sorrow. On the negative side, it's true that the Olympics in Sochi are the most expensive in history, cost over $50 billion, and were way over budget. Folks tend to forget though, that London's Olympics in 2012 were also over budget, as most Olympic events always are.
The history of cost overruns and ill-prepared host venues often gives rise to an idea around the beginning of each Olympic games, of a permanent home, or possible multiple rotating permanent homes around the world. As the editors of Bloomberg News noted, this year's games haven't been exempted from that idea reappearing.
Regardless of the problems with the Olympic games, there is a positive side to them as well. The Olympics almost always give people from all over the world a reason to stop, pause, and come together over a common unifying topic - kind of like the bad weather has done this winter for people across America.
From the record warm winter weather in Alaska, to the severe drought in the Western U.S., to the massive snowfall in the northeast, most of America has been talking about the same subject for a couple months now: The weather.
Frankly, if it was up to us, we'd be more than happy to share some of the snow we've had near our DC offices with friends of ours that live in California. We've even known people to toss around the idea of massive water pipelines criss-crossing the country, to take the excess moisture from those that don't need it, to those that don't have it.
As far as pipelines go, if some labor unions - like the AFL-CIO - want to get behind a pipeline idea that won't further endanger the environment, California's Gov. Jerry Brown has the perfect project for them.
Gov. Brown and other California officials are proposing two massive pipelines to carry water from Northern California to Southern California, and through the desperately dry Central Valley region of the Golden State. While the ideas currently being proposed are a bit farfetched, we see no reason that pipelines couldn't be connected directly to the ocean, run through desalinization plants, and then pumped inland to where the water is truly needed.
One member of our staff has thought for years now a massive pipeline, or even a man-made river should be built along the border between Texas and Mexico. A project like that could carry water from the Gulf of Mexico, along the Eastern edge of the Rockies, all the way up into Nebraska and the Dakotas. It would not only alleviate the perpetual drought problem in places like West Texas and the Oklahoma panhandle. It would also allow farmers and businesses to stop draining the Ogallala Aquifer nearly dry in some places, and make the breadbasket of the nation viable as a place to live long into the future, even with the effects of climate change.
We realize such ideas are - quite literally - pipe dreams. From a permanent sustainable, truly safe and open home for the Olympics, to a nationwide American water pipeline network, the chances of either major idea happening anytime soon are highly unlikely.
Like the games themselves though, both ideas give us hope. In the end, that may be the most redeeming perpetual feature of the Olympics.
For many years now, the Olympics have given our staff members a collective mix of both hope and sorrow. On the negative side, it's true that the Olympics in Sochi are the most expensive in history, cost over $50 billion, and were way over budget. Folks tend to forget though, that London's Olympics in 2012 were also over budget, as most Olympic events always are.
The history of cost overruns and ill-prepared host venues often gives rise to an idea around the beginning of each Olympic games, of a permanent home, or possible multiple rotating permanent homes around the world. As the editors of Bloomberg News noted, this year's games haven't been exempted from that idea reappearing.
Regardless of the problems with the Olympic games, there is a positive side to them as well. The Olympics almost always give people from all over the world a reason to stop, pause, and come together over a common unifying topic - kind of like the bad weather has done this winter for people across America.
From the record warm winter weather in Alaska, to the severe drought in the Western U.S., to the massive snowfall in the northeast, most of America has been talking about the same subject for a couple months now: The weather.
Frankly, if it was up to us, we'd be more than happy to share some of the snow we've had near our DC offices with friends of ours that live in California. We've even known people to toss around the idea of massive water pipelines criss-crossing the country, to take the excess moisture from those that don't need it, to those that don't have it.
As far as pipelines go, if some labor unions - like the AFL-CIO - want to get behind a pipeline idea that won't further endanger the environment, California's Gov. Jerry Brown has the perfect project for them.
Gov. Brown and other California officials are proposing two massive pipelines to carry water from Northern California to Southern California, and through the desperately dry Central Valley region of the Golden State. While the ideas currently being proposed are a bit farfetched, we see no reason that pipelines couldn't be connected directly to the ocean, run through desalinization plants, and then pumped inland to where the water is truly needed.
One member of our staff has thought for years now a massive pipeline, or even a man-made river should be built along the border between Texas and Mexico. A project like that could carry water from the Gulf of Mexico, along the Eastern edge of the Rockies, all the way up into Nebraska and the Dakotas. It would not only alleviate the perpetual drought problem in places like West Texas and the Oklahoma panhandle. It would also allow farmers and businesses to stop draining the Ogallala Aquifer nearly dry in some places, and make the breadbasket of the nation viable as a place to live long into the future, even with the effects of climate change.
We realize such ideas are - quite literally - pipe dreams. From a permanent sustainable, truly safe and open home for the Olympics, to a nationwide American water pipeline network, the chances of either major idea happening anytime soon are highly unlikely.
Like the games themselves though, both ideas give us hope. In the end, that may be the most redeeming perpetual feature of the Olympics.
Thursday, February 6, 2014
Rendezvous With Irrelevance
In virtually every long-term social or political debate, there's eventually a point at which most sensible and intelligent people agree: The public has made a definitive decision.
On the subject of smoking, for example, after nearly fifty years of anti-smoking measures, only about 19 percent of Americans smoke any more. So while Wednesday's announcement by the pharmacy chain CVS that they'll no longer be selling tobacco products after October 1 was significant news, it wasn't exactly Earth-shattering. Americans already passed that decision point on tobacco use twenty years ago. Sure, smoking is still legal, though in far fewer places than it once was. For the most part, those who still remain addicted have been severely minimized as a political power group, effectively making smokers politically irrelevant.
In a similar, yet frightening way, recent studies have confirmed the American middle class has almost been nearly erased, politically, by right-wing political policies over the last forty-plus years. Politicians may still claim to pander to the middle class, but as stories in both Business Insider and the New York Times this past week confirmed, the businesses that depend on the middle class are struggling - because much of the economic and political power of the middle class has already been erased.
There is another major group of Americans that is about to become irrelevant though, and it's one we - and others - have been pointing to for some time.
Of course, we're talking about Americans on the political right, in general, and Republicans in particular.
From President Obama's in-person verbal smackdown of Bill O'Reilly and Fox on Sunday, to most Republicans in Congress knuckling under on the debt ceiling, to the disastrous actions of major media outlets that pandered to the right on the CBO report - nearly everything Republicans and conservatives have touched publicly this week has fallen apart.
If you're a political group with real and growing relevance, your heroes don't get dissed in person by the President on national TV, your party doesn't make weak threats on major policies only to meekly and quietly knuckle under to reality, and you don't act so bizzarely that those in the media trying to pander to you end making asses of themselves as so many did this week on the CBO report.
Michael Gerson of the Washington Post - who, we have to admit, partially inspired our work today - made a similar, if not more focused point about the way Republicans are failing to handle the issue of immigration reform right now.
On Wednesday, Dana Milbank nailed the single biggest reason Republicans keep losing relevance - their insistance on ignoring facts on key issues from Obamacare, to immigration, to the IRS scandal. Sure, the right-wing misinformation feedback loop may make Republicans and those who vote with the GOP temporarily feel better about their own racism, classism, misogyny, and bigotry.
But ask any smoker how they feel about having to stand outside, fifty feet from a building in the middle of winter, in twenty degrees below zero wind chills just to make the physiological monkey on their back feel better. You'll likely hear bitter complaints and whining from those smokers that this isn't the way America used to be. They may even sound eerily like modern Republicans, who also often haven't adapted to the way most Americans think about topics like race, class, and gender today.
We'll agree with the whiners for once - this isn't the same America today, and it won't be the same tomorrow either. As scientist Bill Nye explained clearly in his debate with creationist Ken Ham this week, the world is evolving by minor degrees every day. If we don't progress and adapt, we'll become irrelevant, and then eventually extinct - a scientist's way of saying we'll be erased.
That's the dilemma the GOP is facing now: Change, evolve, and get rid of the Neanderthals in their party holding on too tightly to the past. Or keep pointing and laughing at others, ignoring important but uncomfortable facts, even while their party's relevance and days of long-term influence disappear even further into history.
It doesn't sound like much of a decision to us - but then again, we've been told we have fairly evolved sensibilities.
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