Browsing PBH By Articles

Here’s A REAL DC Scandal

The Article: You Want A Scandal? Here’s A Scandal by Jonathan Bernstein in The Washington Post.

The Text: Want a real Washington scandal — one worse than the (phony) Benghazi scandal and the (apparently real, but apparently limited) IRS scandals combined? Try the continuing, and possibly accelerating, obstruction of executive branch nominees by Senate Republicans.

Don’t think it’s a scandal? It’s pretty basic: Republicans, by abusing their Constitutional powers, are — deliberately, in several cases — preventing the government from carrying out duly passed laws.

The New York Times yesterday highlighted two of the more recent ways that Republicans have manipulated loopholes in Senate rules to delay confirmation of Secretary of Labor nominee Thomas Perez and Environmental Protection Agency nominee Gina McCarthy. It’s worth stepping back and realizing: what’s happening here is that Republicans are delaying these nominations beyond their eventual insistence that almost all nominees must get 60 votes. In other words, they’re filibustering on top of their own filibusters.

Continue Reading

Ayn Rand’s America

The Article: Ayn Rand USA by Paul Buchheit in AlterNet.

The Text: yn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” fantasizes a world in which anti-government citizens reject taxes and regulations, and “stop the motor” by withdrawing themselves from the system of production. In a perverse twist on the writer’s theme the prediction is coming true. But instead of productive people rejecting taxes, rejected taxes are shutting down productive people.

Perhaps Ayn Rand never anticipated the impact of unregulated greed on a productive middle class. Perhaps she never understood the fairness of tax money for public research and infrastructure and security, all of which have contributed to the success of big business. She must have known about the inequality of the pre-Depression years. But she couldn’t have foreseen the concurrent rise in technology and globalization that allowed inequality to surge again, more quickly, in a manner that threatens to put the greediest offenders out of our reach.

Ayn Rand’s philosophy suggests that average working people are ‘takers.’ In reality, those in the best position to make money take all they can get, with no scruples about their working class victims, because taking, in the minds of the rich, serves as a model for success. The strategy involves tax avoidance, in numerous forms.

Continue Reading

Incarceration Nation

The Article: by Fareed Zakaria in CNN Online.

The Text: “Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today,” writes the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik. “Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America – more than 6 million – than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.”

Is this hyperbole? Here are the facts. The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That’s not just many more than in most other developed countries but seven to 10 times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and ­Britain – with a rate among the ­highest – has 153….

Continue Reading

Defining The Real “Value” Of Our Teachers

It’s a typical day at work. You begin to teach the day’s lessons that you prepared the night before when all of a sudden, your surroundings are reduced to a pile of squat cinder blocks. Or when, say, a cowardly man enters the building and spews a fatal stream of bullets at anyone and everyone who dares stand in his way. You continue to do your job, which is–and always has been–to tirelessly nurture, primarily academically but in these circumstances emotionally and physically, your students. The president sees it differently, though, and even awards several Presidential Citizens Medals to some of your peers for what he–and many other politicians and taxpayers around the country–considers true heroism. And yet, that praise has an expiration date. Within the course of a few weeks, the nobility of your profession diminishes, and the number of politicians waxing poetic on your bravery and the insurmountable challenges that inevitably come with your work grows slim. In the eyes of some of the more unsavory legislators, you are back to being “more than greedy”. You are, in case you haven’t guessed by now, a public school teacher in the United States. You are also tired of the lip service.

Following a devastating tornado that tore through the plains of central Oklahoma on Monday, elementary school teacher Suzanne Haley found herself in a hospital with a metal desk leg piercing through her own flesh. Tammy Glasgow had a cinder block fall onto her neck while she ushered her students into the bathroom for protection. Naturally, the praise for these two women was as effusive as it was expansive. And yet, neither viewed their acts as anything especially significant. “It’s nothing anybody wouldn’t do,” said Haley.

Continue Reading

This Isn’t Obama’s Malaise, It’s GOP Intransigence

The Article: This Isn’t Obama’s Malaise, It’s GOP Intransigence by Robert Shrum in The Daily Beast.

The Text: There is a malaise in Washington that’s spreading across the country. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll, “Americans [do] not give Mr. Obama high marks for his handling of issues”—even though they largely, at times overwhelmingly, agree with his positions on background checks for gun sales and a combination of tax increases and spending cuts to rein in the federal deficit.

The disconnect is sharp; the frustration, the sense of ennui palpable from Capitol Hill to California. You could fairly call it the Obama malaise, but it’s not his fault. It’s his very existence, his presence in the Oval Office, that fuels a nihilistic opposition, driving obstruction and seeding an increasingly disillusioned national mood.

That mood is distinctly different from the malaise that prompted Jimmy Carter to his self-pitying crisis-of-confidence speech in the summer of 1979. The crisis he identified then was not merely doubt about national leadership, but something “deeper, deeper”—a “loss of faith” on the part of the American people. He seemed to be saying that they had let the country, and him, down. He urged his fellow citizens “to stop crying and start sweating, stop talking and start walking, stop cursing and start praying”—to stop whining and to “say something good” about America.

Continue Reading