Tea Party Populists Should Demand Progressive Outcomes

The Tea Party movement, which claims it is driven by a resistance to taxation, is really motivated by a widespread sense of economic disenfranchisement, that is now reaching everyone except the superrich. The populist urgency that underscores all of the Tea Party’s energy is not inherently linked to Grover Norquist’s anti-American “Club for Growth”, but the movement has no leader honest enough to openly demand progressive policy outcomes.

Instead, the popular movement has been co-opted by the establishment crowd that caters to corporate interests, foreign and domestic, and which seeks to shift the tax burden away from wealthy multinationals and billionaire investors, and toward the average American middle class and working family. While many Tea Party adherents say they are independent voters angered by corporate greed and government spending, they have routinely and unquestioningly signed up for rapacious budget reform that continues the pattern of transferring most Americans’ hard-earned household wealth to mega-corporations.

Posted by Joseph Robertson

Joseph Robertson is Executive Director of Climate Civics International (climatecivics.org). He represents CCI in the UNFCCC negotiations and other United Nations processes, and in the Earth Diplomacy Leadership Initiative. He is Chief Strategist for Resilience Intel and the Climate Value Exchange, and a member of the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition Advisory Group. Joseph is a principal in the Good Food Finance Network, co-leading efforts to establish a new co-investment platform for food systems transformation and the Integrated Data Systems Initiative. He previously served as Interim Director for the Food System Economics Commission, during its start-up phase, and as Senior Advisor, Sustainable Finance, for the EAT Foundation. He is the founder of Geoversiv (earthintel.org) and The Navigator (navigatornews.net).

Individual Mandate Upheld in Federal Court

A federal appeals court has ruled that Congress acted within its Constitutional authority when it passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law, last year. Importantly, the three judge panel voted two to one, with one Republican nominee and former Scalia law clerk in the majority, that the individual mandate is in line with Congressional authority to regulate interstate commerce.

It is the first time a Republican judge has sided with the individual mandate, in the ongoing wave of legal challenges to the law, and many conservatives see the ruling as a setback. Others say the challenge to the individual mandate will continue until it reaches the Supreme Court. But critics of that view warn there may be unintended consequences of pushing the challenge too far, consequences which might require more, not less, government intervention.

Posted by Joseph Robertson

Refusal to Deal with Revenues is Refusal to Deal with Debt

The view taken by some in Washington that major reductions in the United States’ national debt can be achieved without addressing revenues is essentially a pledge to do nothing serious about the debt or deficit. The reason: the ideology of supply-side tax-cut-only social policy not only requires, but admires “deficit spending”.

Some critics of this way of thinking, most notably fiscally conservative, pro-middle-class Republicans, have called it “voodoo economics”—a mystical and unverifiable faith tradition posing as economic policy, which only serves to divert wealth away from the middle class, draining the federal budget to deliver wealth to the already wealthy.

Posted by Joseph Robertson

Fragility of the Social Contract

Spain’s May 15th movement is often called the revolution of the indignados, indignant at the failure of elective government to solve the problems that increasingly define the lives of ordinary people. The complaint, succinctly, is that the powers that be are collaborating in a systemic failure to live up to the rigors of a healthy, legitimate social contract.

Working people, young adults with university degrees but next to zero job prospects, families pushed from their homes by a real estate boom now shown to be a speculator’s wild west show, congregate, organize assemblies, vote on matters of policy, and demand meaningful political change. They argue together, though often in clashing voices, that the political system is rigged against the majority of ordinary citizens.

Posted by Joseph Robertson

The Only Reason to Slash Budgets is Failure of Imagination

There is only one reason to “slash” budgets, due to fiscal hardship provoked by irresponsible tax giveaways, lawless market manipulation and the ensuing economic recession: the same failure of imagination and recklessness that led to the economic collapse of 2007-2008.

There is quite literally no corner of this country that is so “broke” that it is “in danger” of collapse. The rapidly spreading “budget emergency” is emergent only in the sense that it is suddenly the thought engine driving one major party’s ideological and partisan attack on the economic and political levers that give middle class Americans influence over their government.

Posted by Joseph Robertson

If Court Outlaws Public Campaign Matching Funds, Personal Wealth Should also be Banned from Campaigns

The United States Supreme Court is preparing to hear oral arguments in a landmark campaign finance case, in which a wealthy candidate who chose not to use public matching funds alleges those funds amounted to an illegal enhancement of his opponent’s speech. That assisted speech, the argument goes, was an unconstitutional government intrusion into the territory of his own free speech rights.

Observers say the right-leaning now convincingly corporatist Roberts Court appears likely to side with the wealthy candidate, and effectively outlaw any and all public assistance that would give the non-wealthy a hope of competing. If this is their verdict, the Court should add to its finding that no candidate can spend more than a nominal amount of personal wealth to expand his or her own speech beyond that of a less affluent opponent.

Posted by Joseph Robertson

Amend Constitution to Ban Partisan Redistricting

Every ten years, according to the mandate of the Constitution, the US government conducts a nationwide census, to learn how many people live in each district, in each state, to ensure that membership in the House of Representatives is evenly distributed. And immediately after the census figures are released, all 50 states begin redrawing Congressional districts, according not only to population, but to the registered political preferences and demographic indicators of the populations in question.

The result is what is called “gerrymandering”—the convoluted bending of House districts to ensure that most of them lean decidedly toward the Democratic or the Republican party. The difference is whether one party or the other is in charge. We need to amend that Constitution of the United States to ban partisan redistricting, which is one of the st flagrantly corrupting practices in our democracy.

Posted by Joseph Robertson

Fourth Amendment Rights are Not a Trivial Annoyance

The nation has been facing, ever since September 11, 2001, a mounting pressure to surrender vital liberties in the interest of security. Now, the government is implementing a plan, several years in the works, to require travelers at airports to pass through full body scanners that snow security agents naked images of the passengers’ bodies. The Electronic Privacy Information Center says the scanners violate the Fourth Amendment.

In response to the EPIC lawsuit, a government lawyer has reportedly responded by saying the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) is responsible for ensuring passenger safety, using the latest technologies, and that efforts to fulfill that mission “should not have to stop every five minutes for comment and rulemaking”. This is an offensive and dismissive remark that puts basic liberties at the margins and privileges the arbitrary power of security officials over the rights of individuals.

Posted by Joseph Robertson

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