News at Home

Three Lessons in Emergency Management from Someone Who Did It Well

by Utpal Sandesara and Thomas Wooten

One of the most famous images from Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath lacks any of the visual tropes typically associated with the disaster.  No roofs protrude from a sea of water, and no lines of beleaguered survivors wait in vain for help to arrive.  Yet in its own way, the photograph conveys one of the tragedy’s strongest truths.  A commander-in-chief, bathed in warm sunlight and swaddled in the luxury of his leather-upholstered cabin, peers out the window as his jet takes a low pass over the City that Care Forgot.

The American Family Association Says that the Nazis were Gay—The GOP Needs to Distance Itself from that Craziness

by Jonathan Zimmerman

All of the Republican presidential candidates say that gay people should be prohibited from getting married.  But Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association says that gay people helped bring Nazism to Germany.

The American Family Association Says that the Nazis were Gay—The GOP Needs to Distance Itself from that Craziness

by Jonathan Zimmerman

All of the Republican presidential candidates say that gay people should be prohibited from getting married.  But Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association says that gay people helped bring Nazism to Germany.

Neither Bachmann nor Perry is the Serious Candidate the GOP Needs

by Stanley Kutler

Thomas Paine, the celebrated pamphleteer of the American Revolution, never hesitated to speak truth to power, or what he called “Common Sense.” He wrote in 1776 that “there is something absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.”Imagine the blunt-speaking Paine’s response to today’s political doings. “Absurdity” would have been inadequate to describe his reaction to the recent Iowa straw vote for Republican presidential hopefuls and The New York Times’ anointment of Michele Bachmann as a “serious” candidate, one of the three top contenders. Bachmann placed first by less than 200 votes over Ron Paul, who lends enhanced meaning to a “fringe” candidate. The Iowa voters were fed (and wined?) and the various candidates generally paid their registration fees to vote. Where are you, George Carlin, now that we need you?

Why the Left Needs Its Koch Brothers

by Richard Striner

It’s time for American liberals to pull out their checkbooks and fund a truly powerful campaign that will challenge the Tea Party people and their sponsors.  Challenge them with old-fashioned economic populism.  Two tremendous and headline-grabbing protest marches should be sponsored very soon by the Left—marches of unemployed Americans holding placards and banners emblazoned with a simple slogan:  “Jobs Now.”Our historical tradition of protest marches on Washington began in 1894, when a wealthy and public-spirited man named Jacob Coxey led an “army” of unemployed Civil War veterans to Grover Cleveland’s Washington, demanding a “Good Roads Bill” that would put all the unemployed veterans who saved their country to work building modern America.Nothing happened.

Stock Market Crash: What are the Politics Behind It?

by Robert Brent Toplin

Americans are nervous.  Their investments and homes have been losing value.  Good jobs are hard to find.  Each day the news brings more troubling reports about a mounting debt crisis in the USA, credit downgrades by a rating agency, and the vulnerabilities of Greece, Spain, and Italy.  Americans wonder:  How did we get in this mess?Historian Alan Brinkley observed that “economists and historians still have not reached anything close to agreement” when trying to explain the Great Depression, and disputes about causes of the Great Recession are likely to remain as lively.  Nevertheless, history provides some useful clues for tracing causes and effects.Two perspectives are especially helpful. One draws attention to international factors.  The other focuses on actions (and mistakes) made by leaders in Washington.Americans are in the habit of focusing almost exclusively on domestic events when explaining their economic problems.  Yet U.S. businesses are closely integrated with the global economy. One of the principal reasons that federal authorities rushed to save the mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac back in 2008, was that foreign investors from Japan, Russia, China and other nations had more than $1 trillion in debt issued by those agencies.

How Not To Talk About Financial Panics: New Rules For Pundits

by James Livingston

Herewith a manual of utterance and deportment that might make you sound like you know what you’re talking about when the conversation turns to (a) the stock market (b) and/or the budget debate of the last few weeks and/or (c) the bond rating of the U.S. government as determined by Standard & Poor’s and other rating agencies. These are mainly prohibitions, mind you, mostly don’ts.  I can’t help you if somebody asks how we ought to be thinking about markets, unless you believe, as I do, that we’re living through social, economic, and political change so fundamental that every form of conventional wisdom now feels like an involuntary physical reflex—a spastic, instinctive response to archaic stimuli. 

Conservatives Put Their Faith in the God "Market" ... And It's a God That Can Fail

by Robert S. McElvaine

It is time to revise George Santayana’s famous (and oft-misquoted) dictum, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”What “conservative” (a misnomer if there ever was one) Republicans are doing in the face of the current serious economic problems would fit better with, “Those who willfully deny the past condemn us all to repeat it.”Republican economic philosophy is faith-based, not fact-based.  Their absolute, unquestioning faith is in a deity called the Market, and no matter how many times the evidence shows that faith to be misplaced, they keep insisting on doing the same things.What the faithful in this religion of Marketism accomplished this past week was a rerun of the mistakes that prevented full recovery from the Great Depression and precipitated a renewed and quite severe fall (for which the word “recession” was coined) in 1937.

How to Save a Quarter of a Trillion Dollars: Axe "Missile Defense"

by Lawrence S. Wittner

In the midst of the current stampede to slash federal spending, Congress might want to take a look at two unnecessary (and dangerous) “national security” programs that, if cut, would save the United States over a quarter of a trillion dollars over the next decade.

Obama's Just Another Moderate Republican

by Stanley Kutler

When Barack Obama began his quest for the presidency more than three years ago, admirers and many opponents alike conceded he was smart, tough and articulate. Well, we are left with one out of three.Certainly the recent well-manufactured debt ceiling crisis (yes, we do manufacture something), demonstrated no semblance of toughness or any measure of political savvy. The president spoke of “balance” to settle the matter, a balance that included “enhanced revenues.” But Obama and many of his congressional allies readily abandoned their feeble attempts to raise taxes on millionaires (“like myself,” he said) and to eliminate the “tax breaks” that pervade our American corporate culture. Some resolve; some toughness.One critic, with an eye to history, suggested that Obama declare himself a moderate Republican and seek the nomination of both parties just as in 1820 when James Monroe ran as the only candidate. Then we might replay the “Era of Good Feelings”—which was anything but—with Obama synthesizing Herbert Hoover, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. What political genius!

We May Not Like What Teach for America Has Become, But Maybe Progressives Can Bring It Back to Its Roots

by Mark Naison

The Save Our Schools Conference and March was the single most inspiring protest I have attended in the last thirty years.  To see public school teachers from more than forty states rally in defense of their maligned profession, and to hear the most important education scholars of our time tear apart the business/testing model driving education policy in this country, made me feel that I was part of a movement that was not only going to change school policies, but reinvigorate justice-organizing in a nation that has lost its way.At the “Activism” panel at the conference, I had an epiphany which I want to share, not only with education activists, but all people committed to progressive political change.  And it has to do with how we should relate to initiatives like Teach For America and charter schools, which began with a progressive mission, but now are deluged with corporate money and seem to be committed to the business/testing paradigm that encourages privatization of public education and degrades the teaching profession.

The Debt Deal is "Bad for Everyone": Jim Livingston on the Latest Developments

by David Austin Walsh

What’s your reaction to the latest news out of Washington, that a bipartisan deal has been hashed out by top congressional leaders and the White House?The latest news is bad for everyone, because the deal being worked out is pretty much what the Republicans wanted, minus the balanced budget amendment that the radicals demanded late last week.  Another six months is not enough to calm the markets, and not enough to satisfy Obama's base, so he loses both ways.  Only by misreading this country as center-right could the president "triangulate" in such a pointless manner.  He can be re-elected, but not if he keeps tacking right.You mentioned this in your latest article for HNN: one hears this cry again and again: households have to balance budgets, and the federal government must do the same. Where did this talking point come from?

What Would Alexander Hamilton Have Done in the Debt Crisis? Financial Historian Richard Sylla on the Debt Ceiling

by David Austin Walsh

Are the doomsayers correct about the prospect of a default?

Rick Perry's Vice-Presidential Mistake

by Joel K. Goldstein

Texas Gov. Rick Perry recently denied any interest in being vice president, and that’s understandable.  To be taken seriously, a presidential contender must squelch talk that he or she is really targeting the second spot.   But when he invoked fellow Texan John Nance Garner's famous putdown of the vice presidency, Perry revealed ignorance of more than sixty years of American political history.  Perry suggested that Cactus Jack, Franklin Roosevelt's first vice president, "had a pretty good handle" on the vice presidency when he disparaged the office as "not worth a bucket of warm piss."  Perry also claimed that being governor is a step up from the nation's second job.   But Garner's pithy comment no longer describes the vice presidency.  

Remember in the Debt Limit Crisis, the Real "Job Creators" are Consumers

by James Livingston

All sides in the debate on the debt limit agree that the point of spending cuts or revenue increases is to make room for investment, and thus to induce growth by creating jobs.  The question all sides ask is how to save more—how to consume less, as both individuals and citizens.  That is, how to spend less on consumption, which presumably slows growth because it crowds out investment, whether this consumption takes the form of credit card debt or entitlements guaranteed by the welfare state.Either way, the urge to spend less on consumption makes sense only if more saving, whether private or public, leads to more investment, and if investment, whether public or private, causes economic growth.  The connection between private saving and investment looks doubtful these days because corporations are still sitting on a mountain of profit.But surely the connection between private investment and growth holds?    

Did Beer End Minnesota's State Shutdown?

by Christine Sismondo

When the Minnesota government shut down at the beginning of July, there were several days of relatively sober, national-level conversations taking place about the implications of the impasse.  Nationally, many see this as a preview of deficit-produced budget battles to come and a microcosm of national problems. Fortunately for Minnesotans, the shutdown—at twenty days the longest state shutdown in modern American history—was resolved last Thursday after Democratic governor Mark Dayton dropped his demands for a tax increase on the state's wealthiest residents and the GOP-controlled legislature agreed to abandon its social agenda and attempts to lay off fifteen percent of the state's workforce.

Whatever Happened to Rational Conservatism?

by Caroline Hamilton

In a July 14th article in The New York Times, “Anarchists and Tasseled Loafers,” Timothy Egan compared certain contemporary Republicans to anarchists.  Back in the anti-government heyday of Newt Gingrich, political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow made the same comparison.  Decades earlier, in 1908, G.K. Chesterton explored the relationship in The Man Who Was Thursday, writing:The poor have always been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone in their being some decent government.  The poor man really has a stake in the country.  The rich man hasn’t; he can always go away to New Guinea in a yacht.  The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.  Aristocrats were always anarchists, as you can see from the barons’ wars.

Why Teach For America is Not Welcome in My Classroom

by Mark Naison

Every spring, without fail, a Teach for America recruiter approaches me and asks if they can come to my classes and recruit students for TFA, and every year, without fail, I give them the same answer. “Sorry.” Until Teach for America becomes committed to training lifetime educators and raises the length of service to five years rather than two, I will not allow TFA to recruit in my classes.  The idea of sending talented students into schools in impoverished areas, and then after two years encouraging them to pursue careers in finance, law, and business in the hope that they will then advocate for educational equity really rubs me the wrong way.  It was not always thus.  Ten years ago, when a Teach for America recruiter first approached me,  I was enthusiastic about the idea of recruiting my most idealistic and talented students for work in poor schools.  I allowed TFA representative to make presentations in my classes, filled with urban studies and African American studies majors.  Several of my best students applied, all of whom wanted to become teachers, and most of whom came from the kind of high-poverty neighborhoods  where TFA proposed to send its recruits. Not one of them was accepted!

Michelle Bachmann Was Half-Right: New York's Founding Fathers Worked to End Slavery

by Alan Singer

Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann, a candidate for the 2012 Republican nomination for president of the United States, argues that the founders of the nation “worked tirelessly” to end slavery in the United States.  The historical record is certainly more complicated than Bachmann claims.  Many of the most prominent founders were not proponents of freedom for enslaved Africans at all.

Why the Media Got Betty Ford's Breast Cancer Story Right ... But What They Left Out

by Barron H. Lerner

Given her status as an icon in the breast cancer movement, it might surprise people to learn that Betty Ford made a decision that caused Rose Kushner, one of America’s first breast cancer activists, to become nearly apoplectic.  Yet Mrs. Ford, who died last week, was less of a crusader than a transition figure in the nascent breast cancer movement.  Seeing her in this light makes her contributions no less remarkable.Although other famous women, most notably Shirley Temple Black, had gone public with their stories of breast cancer, the diagnosis of the disease in a First Lady was a momentous event in September 1974.  At that time, cancer was still very much in the shadows.  People with other forms of cancer routinely kept their diagnoses private, even from relatives and close friends.  When the cancer affected the breast, and required removal of an organ with such intense connections to motherhood and sexuality, the silence was often deafening.