From The Regressive Antidote
By David Michael Green

Presidents, and especially former presidents, sometimes say things that will surprise you.

One of the most surprising to many people, and one of the most thematically consistent, is the insistence of their claim to the weakness of the office. In making that complaint, I believe it was Lyndon Johnson – one of the most powerful of American presidents, and the one who accomplished, for better or worse, far more than most of his colleagues in the position – who said in frustration something along the lines of, What can I do? The only power that I have is the bomb, and I can’t use that’.

This consistent theme is remarkable for a variety of reasons, not least including the fact that these very same occupants join the rest of us in describing the office as the most powerful position on the planet. And they are – again, for better or worse – accurate in saying so.

What explains this conundrum is that the president sits atop a country that is head and shoulders beyond every other country in the world in terms of economic, military, political and cultural power. That may well not be the case in 2050, but it is now. To take just one simple example, consider that the United States spends about $1 trillion per year on its military. If you take all the other countries in the world – nearly 200 of them – and combine their spending on the military, together they equal about half of that amount.

At the same time the American president leads this incredibly powerful country, the office itself was designed by the Founders to be about as weak as possible – at least during peacetime – without the country falling apart altogether, as it had been doing under the even weaker Articles of Confederation. Thus, the president’s institutional power is weak, but the country he leads is powerful. And thus the conundrum of a presidency that seems simultaneously powerful and powerless.

Read more Bully Pulpit

From Creators.com
By David Sirota

Without a bailout, newspapers will lay off staff, fewer journalists will report important stories, there will be no Fourth-Estate check on state and corporate power, and the country will suffer. So goes the pro-democracy case for government and/or altruistic investors to save the newspaper industry with an infusion of cash.

Except, amid the debate about such a bailout, it seems government and investors are already subsidizing the industry with in-kind contributions of damning honesty. These outbursts of candor are so brazen and self-explanatory as to require almost zero reportorial resources for blockbuster scoops.

It started in January, when it seemed America would need enterprising journalists to find out whether President Obama’s Wall Street-connected economic team was focused on helping average Americans, or on protecting the super-wealthy speculator class.

Typically, newspapers have to go all Woodward and Bernstein to answer such questions of influence and loyalties. They have to circumvent diversionary press-secretary spin, dig up documents and ferret out leaks — and all of that takes money they increasingly do not have.

But then Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner came right out and said, “We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best to preserve that system.” As Bloomberg News correctly noted, the White House was open about its primary “goal of preserving the private banking system.” Motives admitted, objectives acknowledged, no expensive investigative reporting necessary.

Read more Bailout

From The NY Times
By Paul Krugman

Suddenly it seems as if everyone is talking about inflation. Stern opinion pieces warn that hyperinflation is just around the corner. And markets may be heeding these warnings: Interest rates on long-term government bonds are up, with fear of future inflation one possible reason for the interest-rate spike.

But does the big inflation scare make any sense? Basically, no — with one caveat I’ll get to later. And I suspect that the scare is at least partly about politics rather than economics.

First things first. It’s important to realize that there’s no hint of inflationary pressures in the economy right now. Consumer prices are lower now than they were a year ago, and wage increases have stalled in the face of high unemployment. Deflation, not inflation, is the clear and present danger.

So if prices aren’t rising, why the inflation worries? Some claim that the Federal Reserve is printing lots of money, which must be inflationary, while others claim that budget deficits will eventually force the U.S. government to inflate away its debt.

The first story is just wrong. The second could be right, but isn’t.

Read more Inflation Scare

From True Blue Liberal
By Stephen Lendman

Wall Street’s mantra is that markets move randomly and reflect the collective wisdom of investors. The truth is quite opposite. The government’s visible hand and insiders control markets and manipulate them up or down for profit – all of them, including stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies.

It’s financial fraud or what former high-level Wall Street insider and former Assistant HUD Secretary Catherine Austin Fitts calls “pump and dump,” defined as “artificially inflating the price of a stock or other security through promotion, in order to sell at the inflated price,” then profit more on the downside by short-selling. “This practice is illegal under securities law, yet it is particularly common,” and in today’s volatile markets likely ongoing daily.

Why? Because the profits are enormous, in good and bad times, and when carried to extremes like now, Fitts calls it “pump(ing) and dump(ing) of the entire American economy,” duping the public, fleecing trillions from them, and it’s more than just “a process designed to wipe out the middle class. This is genocide (by other means) – a much more subtle and lethal version than ever before perpetrated by the scoundrels of our history texts.”

Fitts explains that much more than market manipulation goes on. She describes a “financial coup d’etat, including fraudulent housing (and other bubbles), pump and dump schemes, naked short selling, precious metals price suppression, and active intervention in the markets by the government and central bank” along with insiders. It’s a government-business partnership for enormous profits through “legislation, contracts, regulation (or lack of it), financing, (and) subsidies.” More still overall by rigging the game for the powerful, while at the same time harming the public so cleverly that few understand what’s happening.
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From Tom Dispatch
By William Astore

Hardly a week goes by without dire headlines about the failure of the American education system. Our students don’t perform well in math and science. The high-school dropout rate is too high. Minority students are falling behind. Teachers are depicted as either overpaid drones protected by tenure or underpaid saints at the mercy of deskbound administrators and pushy parents.

Unfortunately, all such headlines collectively fail to address a fundamental question: What is education for? At so many of today’s so-called institutions of higher learning, students are offered a straightforward answer: For a better job, higher salary, more marketable skills, and more impressive credentials. All the more so in today’s collapsing job market.

Based on a decidedly non-bohemian life — 20 years’ service in the military and 10 years teaching at the college level — I’m convinced that American education, even in the worst of times, even recognizing the desperate need of most college students to land jobs, is far too utilitarian, vocational, and narrow. It’s simply not enough to prepare students for a job: We need to prepare them for life, while challenging them to think beyond the confines of their often parochial and provincial upbringings. (As a child of the working class from a provincial background, I speak from experience.)

And here’s one compelling lesson all of us, students and teachers alike, need to relearn constantly: If you view education in purely instrumental terms as a way to a higher-paying job — if it’s merely a mechanism for mass customization within a marketplace of ephemeral consumer goods — you’ve effectively given a free pass to the prevailing machinery of power and those who run it.

Read more Selling Education

From Salon
By Joe Conason

For Sonia Sotomayor, nothing could be quite so predictable at this moment as her vicious denigration by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Karl Rove, the denizens of the Corner at National Review Online and the myriad squawking noisemakers on Fox News. With instantaneous unanimity, the right-wing verdict against the judge was handed down. She is “dumb,” or at least “not that bright,” a slur that requires no evidence because she is obviously an “affirmative action” nominee for the high court.

And we all know what that means, don’t we? Just ask Clarence Thomas.

The conservative campaign to dismiss Sotomayor’s accomplishments and diminish her qualifications follows a pattern that is by now all too familiar. Yet she is measurably smarter than most of her critics — if a summa cum laude degree from Princeton and a spot on the Yale Law Review are worth anything — and overcame disadvantages that suburban sons and daughters of privilege (such as Coulter and Limbaugh) probably cannot imagine.

So why do some of Sotomayor’s nastiest adversaries imagine that the public will accept these false characterizations of her intelligence and credentials? Perhaps that instinct follows from the right’s own sad experiences with Republican affirmative action — most notably in the matter of Justice Thomas, who embodied all of the problems that conservatives perceived in the pursuit of ethnic diversity. When the wingnuts attack Sotomayor with inaccurate stereotypes, they’re projecting onto her the shortcomings of their own beloved Clarence.

Read more Sotomayor

From The Washington Post
By Eugene Robinson

President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, is a proud and accomplished Latina. This fact apparently drives some prominent Republicans to a state resembling incoherent, sputtering rage.

“White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich ranted Wednesday on Twitter. My first reaction was that politicians above a certain age should never be left alone in the danger-strewn landscape of social networking. My second thought was: Whoa, Newt, what’s that about?

Rush Limbaugh also — predictably — bellowed endlessly about how Sotomayor was a “reverse racist,” and how Obama was one, too. But unlike Gingrich, Limbaugh doesn’t ask to be taken seriously. He just asks to be paid.

Gingrich’s outburst was in reaction to a widely publicized, out-of-context quote from a 2001 speech in which Sotomayor mused about how her identity might or might not affect her decisions as a federal judge. Far from being some kind of “racist” screed, the speech was actually a meditation on Sotomayor’s personal experience of a universal truth: Who we are inevitably influences what we do.

Each of us carries through life a unique set of experiences. Sotomayor’s happen to be the experiences of a brilliant, high-powered Latina — a Nuyorican who was raised in the projects of the Bronx, graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, edited the Yale Law Journal, worked as a Manhattan prosecutor and a corporate lawyer, and served for 17 years as a federal trial and appellate judge.

Read more GOP

From The Boston Globe
By Dan Payne

Dick Cheney, who didn’t say eight words publicly in eight years as vice president, suddenly won’t shut up. Every day it seems he’s doing interviews and giving speeches on national security, 9/11, and torture.

Torture defined. Torture is having to listen to Cheney sneer his way through a speech on why he and his president were right about everything and President Obama is wrong.

Selling fear. Cheney mentioned 9/11 only 27 times in his recent speech, flatly declaring that Obama was making America “less safe.” But a poll taken after the speech showed 51 percent of Americans disagreed with his wild charge (38 percent agreed). President Obama has a 64-to-31 percent approve-disapprove rating on national security, and the same two-to-one margin on fighting terrorism.

The numbers are good, but if it’s one thing Republicans are good at it’s making Democrats look weak on national defense. Consciously or not, Cheney is attempting to make terrorism the communism of the 21st century.

In 1946, the GOP won control of Congress by painting Democrats as “soft on Communism.” And they’ve been attacking Democrats ever since. Democrats supposedly let the communists take over China, lost Cuba to Fidel Castro, lost Vietnam, and refused to win the arms race against the Soviet Union – which, we’ve since learned, couldn’t even make a toaster.

Read more Terrorism

From The Consortium News
By Robert Parry

Some Americans may think they’re looking tough by refusing to allow any Guantanamo Bay detainees to enter the United States, whether as prisoners to face trial or as people who were incorrectly swept up – like the Chinese Uighurs – and have been deemed no threat to U.S. security.

President Barack Obama and some Democrats may think they’re acting smart in pandering to these fears by proposing extra-constitutional “prolonged detention” for Islamic militants (Obama) or by joining the Republican-led NIMBY chorus of “not in my backyard” (such as Sens. Harry Reid of Nevada and Jim Webb of Virginia).

But the real-life consequence of this panic is to make the United States – and President Obama – look weak in the eyes of the world, and that weakness is already having negative effects.

For instance, with Americans unwilling to let even the Uighurs onto U.S. soil, other countries are balking at requests that they take other detainees who have been judged not a threat.

“If the U.S. refuses to take these people, why should we?” said German parliamentarian Thomas Silberhorn. “If all 50 states in America say, ‘Sorry, we can’t take them,’ this is not very convincing.” [Washington Post, May 29, 2009]

Read more Scaredy-Cat

From The Consortium News
By Ivan Eland

Unfortunately, politicians claim they don’t read opinion polls, while scrutinizing them even more closely than options for their next junket. This has been most evident recently in the civil liberties arena.

On the same day he was inaugurated, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that would close Guantanamo prison in Cuba — a largely symbolic and overrated act to show his break with flagrant Bush administration abuses of civil liberties.

But Obama is not the only person in the Washington public relations circus who is perpetrating demagoguery on the issue.

The Republicans, and now the Democrats, in Congress are fear mongering over the possibility that some of the Guantanamo inmates may come to the United States. In both cases, the politicians read the opinion polls and acted accordingly.

One might say that this is laudable behavior in a democracy and that the politicians are just reflecting what the people want. However, in the United States, we have never had direct democracy.

We have a system of indirect democracy in which periodic elections are held to elect governmental representatives who are supposed to lead. One of the strengths of representative government is the realization that each citizen doesn’t have the time, energy, or knowledge to be an expert on every issue.

Read more Fear