News at Home

We Can't Abandon Our Veterans, but Slashing the VA Budget Will Do Just That

by Ed Hooper

The career soldier is and has always been a rare breed.  Finding the best and keeping the best requires an incentive package that keeps them in the ranks.  It isn’t an American invention.  Gaius Marius used it in 107 B.C. when he reorganized the Roman military from a bunch of conscripted land-owning adventurers into a standing army.The recent proposals to cut military retirement benefits by $42.5 billion as part of the deficit reduction program are an abandonment of a promise this nation gave to its career soldiers.  The argument being made by the Obama administration is that the current retirement system "provides generous benefits to the relatively few members who stay at least twenty years and no benefits for the roughly eighty percent of service members who stay less than twenty years."The current administration proposal is to set up a committee like the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission, report its findings to the Pentagon and let them make the recommendations to Congress.  Among the ideas floated are creating 401ks retirees can’t touch until they’re fifty-seven or sixty; raising premiums on health insurance and the amount of co-pays on medications.

Occupy Wall Street Heralds a Global Counterculture

by Mark Naison

I spent about an hour in Liberty Plaza the other day sitting, walking around, and talking to people before the event I had come for—a Grade-In organized by teacher activists—finally began, and was stunned by how different the occupation was from any demonstration I had attended recently.First of all, in contrast to the last two protests I participated in—a Wisconsin Solidarity rally at City Hall and the Save Our Schools March on Washington—I saw few people my own age and no one I recognized, at least until the Grade-In started.  When I arrived, at 11:00 am, most of the people in Liberty Plaza were the ones who had slept there overnight, and the vast majority were in their 20s and 30s.  They were drumming, sweeping the sidewalk, talking to curious visitors—who were still few in number—eating or chilling with one another.  Their relaxed demeanor blew me away given the tumultuous events of the day before, when more than 700 protesters had been arrested by the NYPD after marching onto the Brooklyn Bridge.

We Need to Do Something Radical to Break Out of Our Malaise

by T.H. McGraw

Who hasn’t heard the urban legend of Queen Victoria, or alternatively Eleanor Roosevelt, graciously replicating the faux pas of an unschooled formal dining guest whom, after accepting an after-dinner finger bowl, mistakenly but happily drinks from it?  We might imagine a slight hush falling upon the entire dinner table, all eyes moving toward their beneficent hostess and then in great merriment, diners reaching one-by-one for their own containers of petal-strewn water in order to concur.  Noblesse oblige and, for the transient moment if not for all time, humane wisdom becomes intensely correct.If only all life were so, so easily charitable.  These days, we may struggle not to focus upon the dark clouds swirling about us; moreover, the awkward division between those doing well through discipline and perseverance, and those disenfranchised so much by loss of employment or in some cases assuredly, by just plain sloth.  “In the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground…” the Hebrew Scriptures convey to us Jehovah’s judgment upon the original couple in sin, though I was advised once by an Israeli that another translation renders even “…the sweat of your nose…”, a more severe depiction yet of possible retribution for mankind.

Can Perry Rebound? He's Done It Before

by John Willingham

The Resurgence of Rick Perry, 2006-2010: A History     In November 2006, Rick Perry had just been reelected governor of Texas but his political star, never too bright statewide, was fading.  In a three-way race he had received 39 percent of the vote.  After this underwhelming victory, the media and pundits added a new nickname to the “Governor Goodhair” title that the late Molly Ivins had bestowed upon Perry, as frequent a target for her barbs as George W. Bush, whom she had called “Shrub.”The new nickname was “Thirty-nine percent Rick.”  Perry was far from being esteemed as a master politician in the state at the time.  Often, he was not taken seriously, or even given full credit for never having lost an election. So exactly how did Thirty-nine percent Rick achieve a stunning victory over Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in the 2010 Republican gubernatorial primary and leave his detractors looking foolish for underestimating him so badly?

Obama Should Copy JFK's First Days in Office and Fight Hunger

by William Lambers

Hunger is on the offensive, even in the United States.  The Department of Agriculture reports that 49 million Americans struggle to get food.  Worldwide, nearly one billion people suffer from hunger, and child malnutrition is rampant in East Africa, Afghanistan, Yemen and many other areas.President Obama and the Congress, as they grapple with the federal budget, also need to protect the hungry.  They can take a page from President John F. Kennedy's playbook for his first days in office, back in 1961.Kennedy's first act as president was to order food aid to hungry people in the U.S., particularly in West Virginia.  Unemployment was high, and it was critical that food support be given during a time of great strain on the people there.  Kennedy's plan involved distribution of food stamps to the needy.  And it worked.

Is the Ghost of Barry Goldwater Haunting Rick Perry?

by Mark Nevin

Texas Gov. Rick Perry's promising presidential campaign may be haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Barry Goldwater. In 1964, early in his presidential campaign, Goldwater criticized Social Security but later backed away from his comments after his Republican opponents and the press jumped all over him.  Perry now finds himself in a similar position.  His characterization of Social Security as a "Ponzi scheme" captured the media's attention, hurt his standing in the polls, and provided an opening for his Republican challengers.  Like Goldwater, Perry retreated from his initial attack on Social Security.  He is now stressing the need to shore up the program, and he is reassuring seniors that their benefits are a "slam dunk" guarantee. But if the history of the Goldwater campaign is any guide—Goldwater managed to win the Republican nomination but lost in a landslide to Democratic President Lyndon Johnson—Perry may not be able to overcome his past attacks on Social Security no matter how hard he tries.   

Citizens United is a Red Herring ... You Can't Separate the Political from the Economic

by Elisabeth Chaves

At the start of 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that the provision of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA) banning corporations and unions from engaging in “electioneering communications” during the thirty- and sixty-day windows before primary and general elections, respectively, was an unconstitutional infringement on free speech.  There was an immediate outcry.  

Finally, Bill Keller, the New York Times's Liberal Hawk, Repents

by Ruth Rosen

Bill Keller was just beginning his "new life" in the opinion section of the New York Times when the catastrophic events of 9/11 altered his life.  Once, he had been skeptical about the use of American military force.  Now, for reasons he still doesn't seem to fully understand, he joined, "an imaginary association of pundits of the I-Can't Believe-I'm a Hawk Club, made up of liberals for whom 9/11 had stirred a fresh willingness to employ American might."  He supported the war in Iraq.

Florida's Bloody Election History Casts a Long Shadow over Voter Suppression Efforts

by Karl Shepard

There’s voter suppression afoot in central Florida—and no one seems to care. Republican Governor Rick Scott has proposed various changes to Florida election laws that make it more difficult for poor people, minorities, and students to vote.

Uncle Sam Does(n’t) Want You: America's Reserve Army of the Unemployed

by Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman

Not long ago, the city council of Ventura, California, passed an ordinance making it legal for the unemployed and homeless to sleep in their cars.  At the height of the Great Recession of 2008, one third of the capital equipment of the American economy lay idle.  Of the women and men idled along with that equipment, only 37% got a government unemployment check and that check, on average, represented only 35% of their weekly wages. 

The War on Higher Education

by John T. McNay

In the wake of last year’s sweeping Republican victories in statehouses across the country, recent months have brought waves of legislation hostile to both academic unions and universities across many states.  The most prominent cases are in Ohio and Wisconsin, but nationwide, according to the National Conference of State Legislators, 820 bills have been introduced that would limit or eliminate collective bargaining rights of public workers, including university faculty.

"What If It Had Rained on September 11?" and Three Other Questions about 9/11

by Jesse Lemisch

Amidst the blizzard of accounts of 9/11, we nonetheless lack information on some of the most central questions.  These unanswered questions are central because they get to the heart of the operation itself and how it was carried off.  The government has answers to some or all of these questions, but it isn’t sharing the answers with us.  Some of this holding back relates to embarrassment about further exposure of stupid policies and inept actions and non-actions.  But there are in addition what seem obvious and partly justifiable reasons: the less that’s known about how to carry out such an operation, the less likely it is that others will  be able to emulate it.  But in order for us to understand and prevent the recurrence of  so cataclysmic and central an event—as well as its awful sequelae—we have a right and a need to know as well as we can, just what happened on 9/11.  Democracy presupposes an informed populace.

New York Banned Handguns 100 Years Ago ... Will We Ever See that Kind of Gun Control Again?

by Daniel Platt

This month New York’s Sullivan Law enters its hundredth year, and while no birthday parties have been scheduled for the legislation that ten decades ago turned handgun ownership in the Empire State from a right to a privilege, its centennial provides a timely occasion to reflect on the past and future of gun control in America. The Sullivan Law was born out of a set of circumstances eerily similar to our own recent history.  On August 9, 1910, William Gaynor, the popular Democratic mayor of New York City, was shot in the neck as he waited to board a steamship in Hoboken, New Jersey.  His assailant, a disgruntled New York dockworker named John J. Gallagher, was immediately wrestled to the ground by bystanders and quickly taken into police custody.  Gaynor, who insisted he was well enough to embark on his vacation, was rushed to a nearby hospital and patched up by a team of surgeons who proclaimed his condition stable.

Did 9/11 Really Change Everything?

by Mary L. Dudziak

We are beginning a week of reflection on the events of September 11, 2001.  Some 10th anniversary events will be memorials, remembering those who perished that day.  Other events will seek to make sense of what 9/11 did – to New York, to the United States, to the world.  So often remembered as a day that “changed everything,” academic panels will be held and op-eds written about just what 9/11 changed, and what it didn’t.But what does it mean to say that 9/11 changed something?  There is often a slipperiness in the causality.  It is sometimes assumed that the terrorist attacks set certain historical events into motion.  But if we see 9/11 as causing the politics, culture and military actions that followed, then we are giving the airplanes that slammed into buildings a powerful determinism.  We are assuming that al Qaeda did not just slaughter thousands, but drove American politics for the next decade.

How Big Government Enables Big Religion

by Benjamin E. Zeller

Science and religion do have something in common: they’re both getter bigger. I don’t mean that there are more scientists or more priests, but that Big Science—the corporate and government-financed scientific establishment that emerged during the mid-twentieth century—has provided a template for the growth and development of Big Religion. Most tellingly, both Big Science and Big Religion have become deeply intertwined with state and national governments.Rather than exist as an actual institutions, Big Science and Big Religion are a composite number of such institutions, movements, and individuals.  The essential nature of Big Religion was, and is, personified by Billy Graham, who called hundreds of thousands to Christ but left particular decisions of which churches to attend to the newly committed Christians.  This was one of the hallmarks and strengths of Big Religion during its early days in the 1950s: it permitted diversity within certain limits.

Herman Cain: The Man from Pizza

by Alexander Heffner

Former vice president and presidential candidate Henry Wallace mastered Midwestern agriculture and seed genetics for growing food.  Ike and his brothers manned a creamery in Kansas.  President Richard Nixon labored in his dad's orange grove and then at his gas station where they sold groceries.  And let’s not forget the peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter, who made a career on the plantation.But not until this election cycle has either major party boasted a candidate with three decades in the food industry:  that's Republican Herman Cain, the unlikely presidential hopeful from Atlanta who has surprised the GOP political establishment with decent poll numbers.  A bona fide foodie (at least in corporate terms), Cain was most recently CEO of Godfather’s Pizza.But Cain was not born to be a food magnate—he became one. Cain admitted in a recent interview that, in his first food industry job as an analyst at Coca-Cola, “I was attracted to Cola because I wanted to make an entry into the business sector.  In all honesty, I wasn’t drawn to Coke because it was food or beverage sector but because it has a great reputation.”

When Else Have Poor People Been So Disenfranchised?

by Jerome Braun

Now that we are about a half year away from the “official” start of the next presidential campaign, it is as good a time as any to take stock.  The unemployment rate still hangs around 9 percent.  No doubt the real unemployment rate, which includes people who have dropped out of the work force together with involuntary part-timers, is close to double that.  We’re also still stuck in wars declared and undeclared with no real end in sight.  And what can be called working-class interests, and a working-class presence in political discussion, is still maudlin, timid, unassertive, and way off the radar screen for most of the mass media.Did we face similar eras of lachrymose whining in the past?  Not by the poor themselves, since they’ve never been given much of a voice, nor from our talking heads, for whom the problems of the poor are as real as the problems of some foreign tribe.The wealthier classes are now, in fact, prepared to spread the word about the benefits of trickle-down economics ad infinitum now that the Supreme Court has decided in the Citizens United case that corporations can add their opinions to political campaigns to their heart’s consent.  The poor can too, if they can figure out how to pay for it.

Kansas City Here It Comes: A New Nuclear Weapons Plant!

by Lawrence S. Wittner

Should the U.S. government be building more nuclear weapons?  Residents of Kansas City, Missouri don’t appear to think so, for they are engaged in a bitter fight against the construction of a new nuclear weapons plant in their community.The massive plant, 1.5 million square feet in size, is designed to replace an earlier version, also located in the city and run by the same contractor:  Honeywell.  The cost of building the new plant—which, like its predecessor, will provide 85 percent of the components of America’s nuclear weapons—is estimated to run $673 million. 

Is Walmart the Cure for Homesickness?

by Susan J. Matt

A Stimulus Isn't Enough to Fix this Economy, But Here are Three Ideas that Might

by Judith Stein

The political oxygen in the United States today is consumed by issues that have nothing to do with reducing the 9.1 percent unemployment rate.  Everyone talks about the priority of creating jobs, and President Obama promises another speech on jobs after Labor Day.  But through most of the year, Republicans fixated on cutting spending, while Obama and many Democrats accepted the notion that the deficit was the main issue facing the nation.  Jobs are an afterthought, a political obligation, not a central ingredient of recovery.  Well-meaning pundits offer work sharing (where companies, instead of laying off employees, reduce hours and pay, with government making up the difference), infrastructure banks, public works, and many other good ideas.  Any one of these policies will become a lot more possible if attached to a larger narrative about what went wrong and what’s to be done.