Now that many Republicans have finally come forward to admit that okay, you were right Sarah Palin is a crazy person, they have to ask themselves what else might I have been completely wrong about all of these years…

I only have one question for Republicans. What took you so long? The rest of us have been watching this dog eat grass for seven years. But now that you know you can do this, what about writing a column called, “You betcha I was wrong about climate change”? Might feel good? Germany gets seventy-four percent of its electricity from renewables. They don’t live in the future. Turn left at Austria, they’re right there. Look ’em up in a history book, they’re always up to something.

Or what about giving up on the idea of sending twelve million Mexicans back to Mexico? There aren’t enough trains. Ask Germany. And as long as we’re in a rethinking mood, you might, you know what might be a good one? Middle East invasions, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria now, Iran all of these places that you want to send heroic snipers. Turns out they don’t like it. They’re not that into being sniped, and what about that great granddaddy of zombie lies: trickle down economics. Can’t we throw that one under the bus too? It’s never worked, and it never will.

—Bill Maher
Quoted in Politicus USA: Bill Maher Shreds Republicans For Finally Admitting That Sarah Palin Is a Crazy Person.

One of the fiercely debated issues in the last presidential election was taxation of the wealthy, and Republican proposals similar to those Romney made when he ran against Obama — lowering or eliminating the taxes on capital gains, interest, dividends, and inheritances — will undoubtedly arise again. I expect Republicans will throw a few bones to the middle class in an attempt to get the support of this important constituency, but I also expect the thrust of the proposals to be the same old supply-side policies favoring the wealthy that we have seen in the past.

What I want to focus on, however, is the economic arguments that are made to support the ideological goal of low taxes. The main argument is that taxes cause distortions that lead us away from the best allocation of our resources, and this reduces economic growth. A particular type of distortion — that taxes reduce the reward from innovative, job creating, growth enhancing economic activity and this reduces the effort that the wealthy are willing to devote to it — is often at the forefront of these arguments…

Wealth gives some people advantages over others who are equally talented and meritorious, advantages they did nothing to deserve except having the right parents. The wealthy have access to better education, highly valuable social networks, more educational opportunities outside the classroom, and so on…

Wealth that is earned rather than inherited is more defensible; though there are legitimate questions about how much of this wealth is truly the result of an individual’s effort rather than from luck, the help of society, and political and economic power that distorts the flow of income. A meritocracy is undermined when workers are not paid what they are worth — when the income workers have earned through hard work is misdirected to those at the top. Hence, there are legitimate questions about how much of the income and wealth of those at the top should be reclaimed and redistributed through taxation…

It’s time to do away with the myth that taxing the wealthy always reduces our economic potential, a myth that serves the ideology of the right. A tax system that reduces inequality of the type that diminishes economic growth reclaims income that should have flowed to workers in the first place, and helps to move us toward the meritocracy that underlies our national identity and fuels our economic system is in our collective interest.

We should not allow ideological arguments dressed up as economic facts, arguments that serve wealthy interests but have little foundation, to deter us from pursuing what’s best for the vast majority of Americans.

—Mark Thoma
Taxing the Wealthy Promotes Economic Growth

Our need to keep health care obscenely profitable is responsible for shortening lives and causing needless pain. We seem not to be able to make the connection when ad campaigns by insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and hospital chains bombard our airwaves. Someone is paying for those ads. We try not to think about who that might be.

Our roads and bridges and buildings are crumbling and we’re supposed to believe there is no money to fix them. We wait for the inevitable disaster that will open the vault to the funds hiding there all along. Large numbers of people will have to die as a sacrifice before more can live.

Private interests are carpet-bombing the land of the free and the home of the brave. We say we don’t know how to stop them, apparently not even noticing that we’ve made a habit of nurturing and promoting politicians who make no secret of their allegiance to them.

But I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know.

So why aren’t we talking about these things all day every day until something gets done about them? Why aren’t we seeing periodic updates on these insults to the human spirit on the news?

—Ramona Grigg
The Things We Leave Undone While We Sweat the Small Stuff

In this country, every automobile company in Detroit got subsidies from the Detroit and Michigan government. They got roads built to convenience their shipping. They got programs in the high schools to prepare people. They got very expensive government paid for benefits for decades. When they got up and left, no one said, “Excuse me, you’re not leaving unless you pay back! We helped you with the idea that you’d stay here. You wanna leave, okay. But you gotta pay back!”

—Richard Wolff
Our Economic Futures: Can Democracy Cure Capitalism?

An appeals court harshly rebuked the Orange County, Florida, Sheriff’s Office over a SWAT-style raid to check for barber licenses, finding it was unreasonable to conduct such an investigation of a second-degree misdemeanor.

The US 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that deputies had violated the civil rights of barbers at Strictly Skillz during a 2010 license inspection, reported the Sun-Sentinel.

“It was a scene right out of a Hollywood movie,” the court ruled.

The lawsuit is related to a series of sweeps at minority-owned barbershops and salons pairing deputies with the state’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation to inspect the businesses.

—Travis Gettys
Court Hammers Florida Sheriff’s Office for SWAT-Style Raid to Check for Barber Licenses

H/T: Peoria Undergrounder

I’ve been studying inequality for more than 30 years, and for most of that time it’s been an issue well out of the limelight. And so I’ve been delighted to see it enter the political conversation in a big way recently.

But something major is missing from that conversation, which centers on questions of fairness. Fairness clearly matters, but focusing on it presupposes a zero-sum competition between different classes. That’s consistent with the conventional view that inequality is good for the rich and bad for the poor, and so the rich should favor it while the poor should oppose it. But the conventional view is wrong.

High levels of inequality are bad for the rich, too, and not just because inequality offends norms of fairness. As I’ll explain, inequality is also extremely wasteful.

It’s easy to demonstrate that growing income disparities have made life more difficult not just for the poor, but also for the economy’s ostensible winners — the very wealthy. The good news is that a simple change in tax policy could free up literally trillions of dollars a year without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone…

—Robert Frank
Why Have Weddings and Houses Gotten so Ridiculously Expensive? Blame Inequality.

Who are the extremists here? Is it the European authorities, which some identify with the Germans but it’s more than them? Or is it Syriza? Back in May of 2010 when they signed their first agreement with the IMF, the debt was 115% of GDP. Then the IMF and the European Commission said, “Okay, you do what we want and you’ll recover and your debt will be sustainable.” So now that that debt is over 170% of GDP — they’ve had six years of recession; they’ve lost a quarter of their GDP; 26% of their labor force is unemployed (double that for youth) — it’s clear who’s been wrong here.

Now if you want to say that they should do more, they’ve already paid a huge unnecessary price. Clearly, there was some adjustment that had to take place. The purpose of any kinds of loans or aid should be to make that adjustment easier, not to make it ten or fifty times worse than it has to be. That’s what they’ve done. So now they’ve adjusted. They’ve had one of the biggest adjustments in imports in the world — 36%. And they have now a primary budget surplus and they have a current account surplus. And the question is, when do they get the recovery after six years of this? And that’s what this fight is about. And Syriza is saying, “Look: we’ve paid too much of a price, we’ve enacted a lot of policies that were really regressive — like a big cut in minimum wage, 40% cut in healthcare spending, change in labor law that weakens the bargaining power of labor, laying off 20% of the national government workers — and we’re going to reverse some of these because we want the economy to grow. We don’t want 16% unemployment in 2018, which is what the IMF is projecting if everything goes well according to their program.”

So I think if you’re looking at it from a more neutral point of view, it’s clear that Syriza is the voice of reason as compared to the extremists that have destroyed not only the Greek economy, but have brought 11.5% unemployment in the Eurozone — which is more than twice what we have in the United States.

—Mark Weisbrot
Interviewed on CounterSpin

Prisoners in this country have been put away, silenced, beaten, sadistically tormented, and most of all forgotten — frequently enough for their entire lives. They have been relegated to conditions and circumstances and physical degradation that shame us as well as them and that no one wants to recognize even though the failure in recognition defines a part of us.

No human being deserves that much punishment. The dignity of every life has to mean more than someone else’s indifferent, much less vindictive, control over it. Anything less is a deprivation for all concerned. The American justice system claims that incarceration and loss of freedom are enough of a punishment. It needs to turn that claim into the truth instead of the lie that lives and breathes in every prison in the country.

—Robert A Ferguson
Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment

I grew up in Chappaqua, New York, which is 20 miles northwest of New Rochelle. Both towns are in Westchester County, but they’re different.

Chappaqua’s population is 81% white, 12% Asian, and 2% black. Its median household income is $100,000. Its poverty rate is less than 4%. New Rochelle’s population is 47% white, 19% black, and 28% Latino/a. Its poverty rate is more than 12%. Its median household income is $67,000.

But here’s how I really know the difference between the two towns.

When I was growing up, my friend Mario, who’s no longer alive, came over to play. It was a snowy day. We decided to throw snowballs at cars. Our position protected by a tall hedge, we packed the snowballs tight and started hurling them onto the street. We did it for a while, till we heard a car screech and stop. And then we ran like hell.

About five or ten minutes later, my dad called out for us. The police were in the driveway. We got a stern talking-to, my parents yelled at us, and that was that.

—Corey Robin
A Tale of Two Snowballs

See: Cowardly Police Officer and the Snowball Fight

In reality, the single most notable example in the last 15 years of an academic being punished for his speech is probably former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, who was fired not for offending feminists but for claiming that some victims of the September 11 attacks were complicit in the crimes of the American state that provoked the attacks. Just a few years ago, liberal Democratic members of Congress and other officials publicly demanded that Brooklyn College cancel a forum featuring academics who support a financial boycott of Israel. Lawmakers threatened to withhold funding from the school if the event took place. Just this month, Duke University announced that it would not allow a weekly Muslim call to prayer to happen at the campus chapel, following criticism and threats from Christians and evangelical leaders. This is what speech policing in America actually looks like: like regular policing, it’s wielded primarily by people in power against marginalized groups and anti-mainstream opinions.

—Alex Pareene
Punch-Drunk Jonathan Chait Takes On the Entire Internet

In the past four years, WikiLeaks has had their Twitter accounts secretly spied on, been forced to forfeit most of their funding after credit card companies unilaterally cut them off, had the FBI place an informant inside their news organization, watched their supporters hauled before a grand jury, and been the victim of the UK spy agency GCHQ hacking of their website and spying on their readers.

Now we’ve learned that, as The Guardian reported on Sunday, the Justice Department got a warrant in 2012 to seize the contents — plus the metadata on emails received, sent, drafted and deleted — of three WikiLeaks’ staffers’ personal Gmail accounts, which was inexplicably kept secret from them for almost two and a half years…

Most journalists and press freedom groups have been inexplicably quiet about the Justice Department’s treatment of WikiLeaks and its staffers ever since, despite the fact that there has been a (justified) backlash against the rest of the Justice Department’s attempt to subpoena reporters’ phone call records and spy on their emails. But almost all of the tactics used against WikiLeaks by the Justice Department in their war on leaks were also used against mainstream news organizations.

For example, after The Washington Post revealed in 2013 the Justice Department had gotten a warrant for the personal Gmail account of Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010 without his knowledge by explicitly accusing him of being an espionage “co-conspirator” (for having the audacity to arrange to confidentially speak with a source), journalists and privacy advocates understandably reacted in shock and outrage.

WikiLeaks staffers faced virtually the same tactics: they had their Gmail seized by the government in secret, they didn’t find out for years after the fact (so they had no way to challenge it) and, according to WikiLeaks’ lawyers, the warrant specifically indicates the Justice Department is investigating WikiLeaks for “conspiracy to commit espionage.” …

Unfortunately the news world has never rallied around WikiLeaks’ First Amendment rights the way they should — sometimes even refusing to acknowledge they are a journalism organization, perhaps because they dare to do things a little differently than the mainstream media, or because WikiLeaks tweets provocative political opinions, or because they think its founder, Julian Assange, is an unsympathetic figure.

Those are all disgraceful excuses to ignore the government’s overreach: the rights of news organizations everywhere are under just as much threat whether the government reads the private emails of staffers at WikiLeaks, Fox News or the Associated Press.

—Trevor Timm
The War on Leaks Has Gone Way Too Far When Journalists’ Emails Are Under Surveillance