Robert Reich writes:

For much of the past century, the basic bargain at the heart of America was that employers paid their workers enough to buy what American employers were selling. Government’s role was to encourage and enforce this bargain. We thereby created a virtuous cycle of higher living standards, more jobs, and better wages. And a democracy that worked reasonably well.

But the bargain has been broken. And until it’s remade, the economy can’t mend and our democracy won’t be responsive to the majority.

What Reich misses is that our democracy is responsive to our over-stressed majority reduced to, in the words of Jamie Oliver, eating chips and cheese out of Styrofoam containers while watching a massive fucking TV.

Like THX 1138…

Roldo Bartimole writes:

One of the first moves made by Jimmy “Cheat them if we can” Haslam when he took over the Cleveland Browns was to pick up $100 million in a naming rights for the Browns stadium – owned, by the way, by the City of Cleveland.

But Haslam grabbed the loot.

But what the hell, the city of Cleveland and its mayor “It is what it is” and its city council too busy being obnoxious doesn’t seem to care.

Is there a single politician in town with some scruples?

Back in the 1990s the naming rights to the baseball stadium and the arena built primarily with public dollars went to the Gateway Economic Development Corp., the operator set up by the County and City to operate the sports facilities.

But that changed.

Haslam took the $100 million.

Lagging Larry Dolan takes the $58 million (16-year contract) for the naming rights from First Energy Corp. for the baseball stadium.

Dan Gilbert takes the full naming rights for the arena – Quicken Loans. He doesn’t disclose how much. What the hell, he owns Quicken Loans so Continue Reading »

Glenn Greenwald writes:

It’s certainly preferable to have the president seek Congressional approval than not seek it before involving the US in yet another Middle East war of choice, but that’s only true if the vote is deemed to be something more than an empty, symbolic ritual. To declare ahead of time that the debate the President has invited and the Congressional vote he sought are nothing more than non-binding gestures – they will matter only if the outcome is what the President wants it to be – is to display a fairly strong contempt for both democracy and the Constitution.

Robert Reich writes:

[H]ave we learned nothing from our mistakes in the past? Time and again over the last half century American presidents have justified so-called “surgical strikes” because the nation’s “credibility” is at stake, and because we have to take some action to show our “strength and resolve” — only to learn years later that our credibility suffered more from our brazen bellicosity, that the surgical strikes only intensified hostilities and made us captive to forces beyond our control, and that our resolve eventually disappears in the face of mounting casualties of Americans and innocent civilians — and in the absence of clearly-defined goals or even clear exit strategies. We and others have paid an incalculable price.

Willietta Dukes writes:

I’ve worked at fast-food restaurants in North Carolina for the past 15 years. I’ve spent more hours at Church’s Chicken, McDonald’s and now Burger King than I can remember. I work hard – I never miss a shift and always arrive on time. But today, I’m going on strike.

I make $7.85 at Burger King as a guest ambassador and team leader, where I train new employees on restaurant regulations and perform the manager’s duties in their absence. Before Burger King, I worked at Church’s for 12 years, starting at $6.30 and ending at just a little more than $8 an hour.

I’ve never walked off a job before. I don’t consider myself an activist, and I’ve never been involved with politics. I’m a mother with two sons, and like any mom knows, raising two teenage boys is tough. Raising them as a single mother, on less than $8 an hour, is nearly impossible, though.

My boys, Tramaine and Russell Jr are now 20 and 21 years old. When they were in middle and high school, I had to work two fast-food jobs to make ends meet. Most days, I would put them on the bus at 6:30am before working a 9 to 4 shift at one restaurant, then a 5-close shift at another. If I had a day off, I was at their schools Continue Reading »

Polly Toynbee writes:

Last night in the Commons a great switch was thrown in the national psyche and nothing may ever be quite the same again. This is not a left-right shift, but a long-delayed acceptance that Britain is less powerful and poorer than it was, weary of wars and no longer proud to punch above its weight. No more pretending, no more posturing.

Next week Rule Britannia will belt out loud as ever at the Proms in that partly ironic parade of cheerful patriotism. But the great game is over. Poor David Cameron has been the one left stranded when the music stopped, still singing as everyone else falls silent.

Toynbee rightly concludes:

The horror of the gas attacks is unbearably raw for all to see on YouTube – but the litany of possible terrors that might be unleashed in a regional conflagration were well-rehearsed in the Commons debate. Weighing risks is as difficult as weighing degrees of moral outrage: 1,000 unarmed demonstrators have been killed by Egypt’s unelected military government, no one has said intervene. How is outrage rationed? Britain may be coming to its senses about its real status, but there is nothing appealing about the new little England isolationism on the right: let the world go hang, so long as we’re alright. It comes with an unpleasant undertow: why fight in Muslim countries for the rights of a lot of Muslims anyway?

Tony Blair’s Chicago speech in 1999 calling for intervention in Kosovo gave a briefly inspiring vision of liberal interventionism, with a moral duty to do what you can, where you can to help others. But between that vision and the reality falls the long dark shadow of 12 years of war, in countries that don’t thank us, doing more harm than good, killing many and sending home hundreds of our soldiers in coffins. If the US goes ahead without us, just possibly this week the last illusions of empire will be finally laid to rest.

I allow my self the luxury and entertain a fantasy that sanity has turned a corner…

Sherry Chandler reminded me this morning of the power of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath:

The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was a part of the monster, a robot in the seat. The thunder of the cylinders sounded through the country, became one with the air and the earth, so that earth and air muttered in sympathetic vibration. The driver could not control it—straight across country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat’, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractors, the monster that sent the tractor out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him—goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the land as it smelled; his feet did not stamp the clods or feel the warmth and power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals.

As Sherry notes, the writing here could have been written by Wendell Berry, but in my mind I see a Borg-assimilated Berry reciting the infamous resistance is futile.

Only we, through the choices we make, the words we use, can put the lie to that assertion.

Jay Rosen writes:

As a former head of the CIA and the NSA, [Michael] Hayden said he understood that he would be constrained by what American democracy thought acceptable. All he wanted from Congress was clear guidance. “Tell me the box,” he said, making a square with his hands as he talked. “Give me the box you will allow me to operate in. I’m going to play to the very edges of that box.” He said he would be “very aggressive,” and probably “get chalk dust on my cleats” but still:

You, the American people, through your elected representatives, give me the field of play and I will play very aggressively in it. As long as you understand what risk you are embracing by keeping me and my colleagues in this box, Charlie, we are good to go. We understand. We follow the guidance of the American people.

Hayden’s sketch of a surveillance state properly constrained by a wary public left a few things out, of course. When the Director of National Intelligence can lie to Congress in open session and keep his job, Hayden’s system has broken down. When United States senators, alarmed about what they are told, cannot alert the American people because of secrecy requirements, Hayden’s “through your elected representatives” becomes a hollow phrase. Over-classification makes “national consensus” impossible on its face. A ”secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans” is not likely to generate much discussion… is it? Hayden’s descriptions sound reasonable — reasonable enough that Charlie Rose didn’t push back on them — but the behavior of the surveillance state doesn’t match up with his soothing words.

WHICH IS WHY WE NEED JOURNALISTS! [Emphasis in original, JH] In fact, we can go further. Without including in the picture an aggressive press that is free to operate without fear or coercion, the surveillance state cannot be made compatible with representative democracy. Even then, it may be impossible.

Daniel Ellsberg writes:

By no means was I treated as a hero when I first came forward. I was indicted and spent two years in court. But in those days, journalists were not turning on journalists. With Snowden in particular, you have a split between truly independent journalists and those who are tools — and I mean that in every sense of the term — of the government. Toobin and Grunwald are doing the work of the government to maintain relationships and access.”

Hans Blix writes:

We may agree with John Kerry, the US secretary of state, that the use of gas is a “moral obscenity”, but would we not feel that “a measured and proportionate punishment”, like striking at some missile sites or helicopter bases, is like telling the regime that “you can go on with your war but do stay away from the chemical weapons”? And what is the moral weight of the condemnation by nuclear weapons states of the use of gas as a serious war crime when they themselves will not accept a norm that would criminalise any first use of their own nuclear weapons?

This is my observation: we only draw a line in the sand when we need a moral justification to bring the violence we really desire.

Robert Reich writes:

A few days ago I had breakfast with a man who had been one of my mentors in college, who participated in the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s and has devoted much of the rest of his life in pursuit of equal opportunity for minorities, the poor, women, gays, immigrants — and also for average hard-working people who have been beaten down by the economy. Now in his mid-80s, he’s still active.

I asked him if he thought America would ever achieve true equality of opportunity.

“Not without a fight,” he said. “Those who have wealth and power and privilege don’t want equal opportunity. It’s too threatening to them. They’ll pretend equal opportunity already exists, and that anyone who doesn’t make it in America must be lazy or stupid or otherwise undeserving.”

“You’ve been fighting for social justice for over half a century. Are you discouraged?”

“Not at all!” he said. “Don’t confuse the difficulty of attaining a goal with the urgency of fighting for it.”

“But have we really made progress? Inequality is widening. The middle class and the poor are in many ways worse off than they were decades ago.”

“Yes, and they’re starting to understand that,” he said. “And beginning to see that the distinction between the middle class and poor is disappearing. Many who were in the middle have fallen into poverty; many more will do so.”

“And, so?”

He smiled. “For decades, those at the top have tried to convince the middle class that their economic enemies are minorities and the poor. But that old divide-and-conquer strategy is starting to fail. And as it fails, it will be possible to create a political coalition of the poor and the middle class. It will be a powerful coalition! Remember, demographics are shifting. Soon America will be a majority of minorities. And women are gaining more and more economic power.”

“But the 400 richest Americans are now wealthier than the bottom 150 million Americans put together — and have more political influence than ever.”

“Just you wait,” he laughed. “I wish I had another fifty years in me.”

His mentor does not have another fifty years in him. I doubt that I have another fifty years in me. My students, however, do. The struggle will continue.

George Packer internalizes the debate:

So it looks like we’re going to bomb Assad.

Good.

Really? Why good?

Did you see the videos of those kids? I heard that ten thousand people were gassed. Hundreds of them died. This time, we have to do something.

Yes, I saw the videos.

And you don’t want to pound the shit out of him?

I want to pound the shit out of him.

But you think we shouldn’t do anything.

I didn’t say that. But I want you to explain what we’re going to achieve by bombing.

We’re going to let Assad know that chemical weapons are over the line. There’s a reason they’ve been illegal since Verdun or whenever.

Except when Saddam used them against the Kurds—we knew, and we didn’t say a word.

Is that a reason to let Assad use them against his people?

At this point, I don’t think Assad is too worried about the Geneva Conventions.

He should have to think hard before using them again.

He’s a bloody dictator fighting for survival. He’s going to do whatever he has to do.

Bomb makers are in a panic, if we don’t get back to war real quick, their next quarter profits are going to decline, and that is bad for America, or something.

I like TED Award winner Jamie Oliver. I’ve read several of his cookbooks. I’ve watched his videos. I’ve even blogged in support of his attempt to save Huntington, West Virginia.

He can, however, be such an annoying, self-important twit.

Alex Andreou writes:

I don’t think Tuesday’s seafood risotto, Wednesday’s sizzling chicken fajitas or Saturday’s mojito fruit salad would quite “weigh up”. Because the missing factor in all of this, is that the majority of the industry – cooking shows, recipe books, foodie displays, trendy markets – are aspirational. They are not concerned with who you are, but push an image of the much better person you should aim to become. And becoming that better person involves buying a whole load of useless cack, which poor people cannot afford.

I like Oliver, on the whole. I think his heart is in the right place. If he genuinely wants to help, he needs to continue campaigning for better availability of good produce, better nutritional teaching in schools, healthier ready meals, less advertising targeted at children and a culture that educates rather than judges. He needs to stop publishing books, the last one of which was judged one of the unhealthiest on the market, while internally tutting at the deplorable lack of quinoa in “poor communities”. He needs to understand that the choice between having a TV or a mojito fruit salad is a bogus one, for the 13 million people living in poverty in the UK right now.

Robert Reich writes:

At the very least, the minimum wage should be increased from the current $7.25 an hour to $10.50 — and to $15 in areas of the country with a higher cost of living. Had the federal minimum simply kept up with inflation from the late 1960s, it would already be well over $10 today.

Contrary to the predictable pontifications of conservative pundits, such a raise won’t cause many low-wage workers to lose their jobs.

Unlike industrial jobs, these sorts of retail service jobs can’t be outsourced abroad. Nor are they likely to be replaced by automated machinery and computers. The service these workers provide is personal and direct: Someone has to be on hand to help customers and dole out the burgers.

And don’t believe critics who say any wage gains these workers receive will be passed on to consumers in higher prices. Big-box retailers and fast-food chains have to compete intensely for consumers. They have no choice but to keep their prices low.

This means wage gains for low-paid workers are most likely to come out of profits – which, in turn, would slightly reduce returns to shareholders and compensation packages of top executives.

That wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

According to a report by the National Employment Law Project, most low-wage workers are employed by large corporations that have been enjoying healthy profits. Three-quarters of these employers (the fifty biggest employers of low-wage workers) are raking in higher revenues now than they did before the recession.

McDonald’s — bellwether for the fast-food industry — posted strong results during the recession by attracting cash-strapped customers, and its sales have continued to rise. McDonald’s CEO, Don Thompson, was awarded a big-whopper of a compensation package last year, valued at $13.8 million.

Yum!Brands, which operates and licenses Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut, has also done wonderfully well. Its CEO, David Novak, received $11.3 million in compensation last year. The company enjoyed a 13 percent gain in annual earnings — its eleventh straight year of double-digit growth. Shareholders got a return of 15 percent.

Walmart – the nation’s largest employer – also continues to grow despite a sluggish economy, and pays its executives handsomely. The total compensation of Walmart’s CEO, Michael Duke, was $20.7 million last year, up from $18.1 million in 2011. Total sales rose 5 percent to $466.1 billion. Earnings per share rose 10.6 percent.

Not incidentally, the wealth of the Walton family – which still owns the lion’s share of Walmart stock — now exceeds the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of American families combined, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

It would not be a tragedy if some of these shareholder returns and compensation packages had to be trimmed in order that low-wage workers at McDonald’s, KFC, and Walmart got a raise.

Indeed, if this nation is to reverse the scourge of widening inequality, such a trimming is necessary.

Kristin Beck writes:

Private Manning has been thrust into the public eye in the last few days. Manning has told the military that “he” has a gender identity issue and wishes to be addressed as “Chelsea” and start hormone replacement therapy. This all emerged after Manning pled guilty to criminal acts and was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Manning’s case brings up many possible courses of action for the military – and diverse opinions from everyone. The one thing that I feel very passionate about is that being transgender has nothing to do with criminal activity, mental capacity, intellect, or any other capability or behavior an individual shows. Being transgender is a separate issue.

Although PFC Manning will eventually be dishonorably discharged, according to his sentence, he is still a part of the military. As the US military is charged with the care of PFC Manning for the next 35 years (subject to parole or pardon), it is duty-bound to ensure Manning is not punished in “cruel and unusual” ways. It is also obliged to ensure Manning’s safety.

My best friend in the Navy let me know, years after our discharges, that she had begun the transition from male to female. I’ve lost touch over the years, but she moved through all the necessary counseling, hormone therapies and surgeries to complete the reassignment and more than 20 years ago legally married. (That is an interesting, and separate, tale in of itself.)

I did my best to be supportive, but my own ignorance and inexperience meant that I was not as good a friend as I ought to have been. I regret that deficit. Chelsea Manning has baggage far beyond that of my friend or Beck. I wish her well and intend to do what little I may to ease her sentence and transition.

From Reuters:

The US whistleblower Edward Snowden got stuck in the transit zone of a Moscow airport because Havana refused to let him fly from Russia to Cuba, a Russian newspaper has claimed.

This puts an entirely different spin on Post-Fidel Cuba:

Citing several sources, including one close to the US state department, [the Russian] Kommersant newspaper said the reason was that at the last minute the Cuban authorities had told officials to stop Snowden from boarding the Aeroflot flight.

It said Cuba had changed its mind after pressure by the US, which wants to try Snowden on espionage charges.

What economic carrot did the Obama administration threaten to withhold if Snowden were allowed to return to the Western Hemisphere?