Sunday Round-Up - January 5, 2014

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream media.  Today we look at the expiration of long-term unemployment benefits, the Tea Party-controlled states of North Carolina and Florida, the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, the violence in South Sudan, and Australia's record heat wave.

Thanks to Congressional inaction, long-term unemployment benefits expired the weekend after Christmas.  To see what might happen nationally if this remains the case, take a look at what's happened in North Carolina, which is in the process of becoming one of the most regressive states in the nation. A December 17 piece on the Bloomsberg website by Evan Soltas does just that.  North Carolina Republicans cut long-term unemployment benefits earlier this year. The result: "The state is experiencing the largest labor-force contraction it's ever seen -- 77,000 fewer people were working or searching for work this October than a year ago. This should, but won’t, settle a partisan debate. Cutting unemployment insurance apparently hasn’t encouraged the unemployed to look harder for work: It has caused them to drop out of the labor force altogether."  When there are no jobs to be had, cutting unemployment benefits does nothing but add to the burdens of those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. 

Mother Jones' Kevin Drum in a December 23 article gives 10 reasons why the long-term unemployment constitutes a national catastrophe.  Besides the widespread human effects, "it turns cyclical unemployment into structural unemployment."  Cutting off long-term unemployment benefits makes the situation worse by causing people to drop out of the job market as they did in North Carolina.  Drum concludes with a faint hope for the restoration of long-term unemployment benefits. "Republicans in Congress have declined to extend unemployment benefits further, and they show no sign of changing their minds when Congress reconvenes in January. Democrats have a plan to fight for further benefits by linking them to a farm bill that Republicans want to pass, and right now that's pretty much the best hope we have to offer the workers who have been most brutally savaged by the Great Recession."

(Image from the Mother Jones article)

 

 

As the country prepares for the 2014 elections, things are looking up (believe it or not) for Republicans.  Some polls show them taking control of the Senate for the last two years of Obama's Presidency.  With the huge number of gerrymandered, safe Republican Congressional districts brought about in red states since the 2010 census and with the voter suppression laws about to take full effect, I expect Democrats to pick up very few, if any, seats in the House without a major Republican meltdown. 

 

So let's imagine what a Tea Party country would look like.  In an article appearing earlier this year, Mother Jones' Stephanie Mencimer asked "What's It Like to Wake Up From a Tea Party Binge? Just Ask Florida!"  She writes: "In just one year, Scott and his conservative allies slashed state spending by $4 billion even as they cut corporate taxes. They've rejected billions in federal funds in one of the states hardest hit by the recession. They've axed everything from health care and public transportation initiatives to mosquito control and water supply programs."  Mencimer provides the following sidebar in her article:

"From high-speed trains to care for terminally ill kids: a few of the federal grants Florida has turned down:
$2.4 billion: High-speed rail

$37.5 million: Support for people moving out of nursing homes

$31.5 million: Home visits for new mothers
$11.1 million: Teen pregnancy and STD prevention
$8.3 million: Three county health centers
$2.1 million: Helping Floridians navigate the health insurance industry
$2 million: Hospice care for children
$2 million: Aid for seniors to pay for Medicare premiums and buy prescription drugs
$1 million: Strengthening state review of insurance premium increases
$1 million: Insurance exchange to help consumers compare plans and buy subsidized coverage
$875,000: Cancer prevention"

Florida, the state with the second highest number of medically uninsured, has been in the lead in the fight against the Affordable Care Act.  The demon has been let out of the proverbial box.  Even though Governor Scott reversed his initial position and supported expansion of Medicaid, the Republicans in the legislature turned him down.  The Kaiser Foundation has estimated that about 4.8 million low-income people in states choosing not to expand Medicaid would have been covered had they lived in another state.  For Florida this number is over 750,000. 

The MJ article was written at a time when Scott was down by high double digits to a generic Democrat in the 2014 election.  Scott made his way back to as close as 4 points during the healthcare.gov rollout debacle and a November Quinnipiac poll has him trailing by just 7 points.  And that's before the big money starts to flow in. 

In Brief - Links to Other Stories of Interest

From The Guardian, Dec. 31
Rightwing Israeli government ministers have stepped up their opposition to a peace deal with the Palestinians before US secretary of state John Kerry's visit to the region this week by backing a parliamentary bill to annex a strategically significant swath of the West Bank.

From The Guardian, Jan. 3
South Sudan's government and rebels finally began talks to end weeks of bloodletting on Friday after days of delay as the United States ordered out more of its embassy staff.  However, there was no face-to-face meeting, and fighting was reported near the key town of Bor, suggesting that a halt to fighting between President Salva Kiir's SPLA government forces and rebels loyal to former vice president Riek Machar is still a long way off. At least 1000 people have died in the fighting that began last month.

From Informed Comment website, Jan. 3
Australia experienced its hottest year on record in 2013, the Bureau of Meteorology said Friday, enduring the longest heat wave ever recorded Down Under as well as destructive bushfires.

From The Guardian, Jan. 4
John Kerry, the US secretary of state, is engaged in intense efforts to coax reluctant Israeli and Palestinian leaders towards an agreement to end their decades-old conflict, against the unhelpful backdrop of mounting political pressure on both sides to reject concessions.

Sunday Round-Up - July 20, 2013

This is the weekly selection from sources outside the US mainstream media.  Today we look at the preliminary talks soon to get underway in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and Florida's stand your ground law, which played a major role in the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the death of Trayvon Martin.  Sources are The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Haaretz and Mother Jones.

Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process
This weekend The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and Haaretz all had posts dealing with the apparent movement toward preliminary talks in the long stalled Israeli-Palestinian final status negotiations.  The Guardian post noted that the Israelis had agreed to the release of Palestinians held in Israeli jails: "Yuval Steiniz, Israel's minister for international relations, said a prisoner release would be carried out in stages. 'I don't want to give numbers but there will be heavyweight prisoners who have been in jail for tens of years,' he told Israel Radio."  Somewhat more pessimistically they noted that Steiniz "said Israel would balk at agreeing on the pre-1967 border as the parameter for territorial negotiations. 'There is no chance we will agree to enter any negotiations that begin with defining territorial borders or concessions by Israel, nor a [settlement] construction freeze'. "  As for the Palestinian position, The Guardian reported "A senior Palestinian official said President Mahmoud Abbas had signed up 'not to a resumption of negotiations but only talks about talks'. The Palestinians would demand a written statement that the 1967 border would be the basis for territorial negotiations, he said, but the expectation was that Israel would refuse."  Al Jazeera also noted the prisoner release although they quoted Steiniz that the number would be limited.  " 'There will be a limited release of [Palestinian] prisoners,' Steinitz, the minister in charge of international relations and strategic affairs, told public radio on Saturday without giving numbers."  Al Jazeera's Rosalind Jordan, reporting from Washington, said "There's been concern about the number of settlements being built in the Occupied West Bank and a growing sense of dread that the prospect of a two state solution was slipping away.  It could be said that, if nothing else, Kerry has made a full throated effort to try to keep the two state solution alive." Haaretz reported on the role of European sanctions against the illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land in getting the parties to at least be at the same table: "The officials said the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas felt that the EU sanctions supported his position and therefore encouraged him to give up on his demand for a complete settlement freeze. Netanyahu, on the other hand, was alarmed by the sanctions’ effect on Israeli markets and on its international standing; furthermore he feared that Israeli public would blame him personally for Israel’s isolation."

Stand Your Ground
Florida's "stand your ground" law, which played a major role in the acquittal of George Zimmerman has been the object of rightful outrage in the past week.  In The Daily Show’s take on it, "acting-host John Oliver cuts to the quick, beginning with this:

 “… According to Florida law, you can get a gun, follow an unarmed minor, call the police, have them explicitly tell you to stop following them, then choose to ignore that, keep following the minor, then get into a confrontation with him, and if at any point during that process you get scared, you can shoot the minor to death and the state of Florida will say, ‘Well, look, you did what you could.’”

Meanwhile, Mother Jones debunks the conservative argument that the stand your ground law did not play a role in the acquittal.  From the Florida authorities' early mishandling of the case to the judge's instructions to the jury, the existence of the law was clearly the determining factor in the acquittal.  The July 19 post concludes that, in spite of the defense team not raising the issue of the statute, "in the end the statute still helped the defense.  In a follow-up statement to CNN after her interview sparked criticism, Juror B-37 said: 'My prayers are with all those who have the influence and power to modify the laws that left me with no verdict option other than 'not guilty' in order to remain within the instructions.'  And she and her fellow jurors may never have had to endure the trial if it weren't for Stand Your Ground, suggests  [Laura] Cutilletta, [a senior attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence]. "The increased paranoia that comes with being armed combined with the sense of legal entitlement to kill at will, we think, all contributed to the incident even occurring in the first place."

What's with Florida?

It's sort of like when “W” extended the so called “War on Terror” to Iraq. There were absolutely no Al-Qaeda in Iraq until our misguided invasion inspired their recruitment and drew them there. Now Florida, one of the Republican-held voter suppression states, finally has some real cases of voter fraud to talk about. The fraud is the work of Republican operatives.

I heard of the growing scandal on Saturday while I was making get-out-the-vote calls for MoveOn. I was talking to a MoveOn member from Detroit when he asked what we were going to do about the voter fraud in Florida. I looked up the various posts and, sure enough, Republican operatives were engaged in voter registration fraud. The operative's firm has ties deep within the Republican party and has received $3 million from the RNC over the past two months. The firm, Strategic Allied Consulting, was finally fired by the RNC Thursday. The widespread nature of the fraud (11 counties so far) became apparent late in the week and that's when the story went (more or less) national. Frankly, it's not getting nearly the exposure that it should in the national news media. The New York Times had a short article on September 28, as did the Washington Post.

By far the best coverage is coming from the Brad Friedman's watchdog BRAD BLOG, which broke the story as it started to unveil on Tuesday. From the September 30 BRAD BLOG post: “The strategy [of registering only Romney supporters] resulted in...fraudulent registration forms collected by the firm and then submitted in Florida by the state GOP with voter addresses, signatures and party affiliations changed.... Election officials in the state have told The BRAD BLOG that they fear the scheme could result in the disenfranchisement of a still-unknown number of otherwise legal voters.”

 

So here we go again. In the key swing state of Florida, the poster child for the Republican voter suppression effort and the scene for the infamous “no recount” SCOTUS decision that handed the 2000 election to Bush, Republicans have registered voters fraudulently. In the process, they have possibly disenfranchised many additional legal voters not already disenfranchised by the voter suppression effort. In this state of affairs, the polls showing an Obama lead in Florida mean nothing.

Other Republican tactics to discourage Democratic-leaning voters include closing or changing polling places (a voter in Ohio told me that in his town the number of polling locations was reduced from 15 to 4) and sending operatives to polling places as vote challengers (voters in both Florida and Michigan mentioned this to me). On the latter, there were some encouraging words from a lawyer in Michigan, who said she was going to go to the polls to ensure in Wayne County (Detroit) that voters were not intimidated by what she called “young men with clipboards”. The MoveOn member from Detroit mentioned earlier had a good response too: “I vote in Detroit and those [poll watchers] are not going to dare to intimidate anyone.”

Even if President Obama wins in November, there is a good possibility that Republicans will still control the House and may pick up the Senate. Thanks to the Citizens United decision, Democrats across the board are being outspent many-times-to-one, in these races. Even Kirsten Gillebrand in heavily Democratic New York State appears to be in a tight race. We should never underestimate what money can do to swing the election. Just look at Scott Walker's victory in the Wisconsin governor recall election and at the 2010 Congressional midterm elections. Money wins elections and until Citizens United is overturned, Republicans will have an insurmountable money advantage. Voter turnout (and protection) and message framing are key to overcoming the money advantage. Democrats need to make sure their message is heard. They need to respond to falsely accusing attack ads immediately (please, no more swiftboat “responses”) - before the lies take on a patina of truth in the mind of the American public.

 

After going on about the missed opportunities and disappointments of Obama's first term, Kevin Baker in the October Harper's Magazine, concludes his article “Why Vote?” this way: “So yes, go out and vote. Go vote for Barack Obama, and whatever other Democrats or progressives are running for office where you live. To vote for a Mitt Romney—to vote for the modern right anywhere in the West today—is an act of national suicide. The right is hollow to its core; it has no dreams, no vision, no plans to deal with any of the problems that confront us, only infantile fantasies of violence and consumption. But it is, at the moment, well funded, well organized, and feeling especially threatened. It is capable of anything.”

 

Miscellany – Links to Articles of Interest

 

Wisconsin's anti-union law advanced by Gov. Scott Walker and the Wisconsin State Legilature was struck down as unconstitutional on September 14. Dane County Circuit Judge Juan Colas struck down the law, which essentially eliminated collective-bargaining rights for most public employees, as a violation of the state and U.S. Constitution. (Politico)

 

Pennsylvania's strict voter ID law remains in limbo although a Pennsylvania judge (to whom the Pennsylvania Supreme Court “punted”) said on Thursday that he may issue an injunction. As the sage Yogi Berra once sid: “It ain't over 'til it's over.” Opponents argue the law could create "a very large problem" for as many as half a million voters in Pennsylvania. They argue that a disproportionate number of those impacted would be racial minorities, the elderly and other vulnerable groups. (CBS News, Sept. 27)

 

Robert Reich's video on the 7 Biggest Economic Lies (MoveOn clip)

 

 

 

 

Florida 2000 Redux

A formidable legal battle is taking shape in the key battleground state of Florida.  At stake is Florida's 29 electoral votes and, quite possibly, the ever-tightening 2012 Presidential election.  Florida's Republican governor Rick Scott has ordered a purge from the voter rolls of up to 180,000 supposed non-citizens.  As happened in Florida's 2000 purge of alleged felons, mistakes will be made, eligible voters will be eliminated from the voter rolls and  turned away at the voting booth.

The political organization People for the American Way summarizes the impact of Florida's 2000 pre-election purge this way: "The state that ultimately decided the election for George W. Bush by a mere 537 votes, hired a firm to purge ex-felons -- who had lost their right to vote according to state law -- from the voter file. But the data match was so sloppy that countless eligible voters, mostly African American, were scrubbed from the file and turned away from the polls on Election Day."

It's not too different this time around...more than 60% of the "suspect" voters are African-American or have Hispanic surnames.  Considering Florida's flawed 2000 purge, the number of potential errors is staggering.  As with the Florida voter ID laws, this is clearly a partisan attempt to disenfranchise minority voters who typically vote Democratic.

Both the Federal Government and the State of Florida have filed lawsuits in the case.  As reported in by Janell Ross in a June 11 Huffington Post blog: "The Justice Department said it will sue Florida in federal court for violating two federal laws that prevent states from suppressing voters [the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1993 Voter Registration Act]....Hours earlier, Florida filed a lawsuit...against the ... U.S. Department of Homeland Security, accusing the agency of denying access to a federal database with information about immigrants."  You really have to admire the chutzpah of these Florida Republicans - blaming the Federal Government for causing them to violate the law! There is one bright spot in all this: so far all but one of the 67 county election supervisors have "refused to participate [in the voter purge], citing errors in the state's list of suspected non-citizens."

I'm not sure which is the worse assault on our democracy - the unlimited, anonymous cash unleashed by the Citizens United decision or the organized, blatant effort at voter suppression by Republican governors and legislators.  One thing seems clear, though: Florida's latest gambit is taking voter suppression to the next level.