Category: Analysis
US Corporate Giants Pay More to CEOs than in Federal Taxes
| November 19, 2014 | 8:26 pm | Analysis, National | Comments closed
Published 18 November 2014
SOURCE: TELESUR ENGLISH
 Seven of the biggest U.S. corporations received billions of dollars in tax refunds from the Internal Revenue Service, while dolling out an average of US$17.3 million to CEOs.
While Congress is set to renew a slew of corporate tax breaks, new research published Tuesday found some of United States’ biggest companies pay their CEOs more than they give up in federal taxes.
The study’s authors warned the data illustrates “deep flaws in our corporate tax system.”
Published by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Center for Effective Government, the research found that seven of the biggest U.S. corporations were refunded US$1.9 billion by the IRS, despite collectively declaring over US$74 billion in domestic pre-tax profits. On average, each company paid its CEO around US$17.3 million. The study found if the group of companies had paid the full 35 percent marginal statutory tax rate, the federal government would have enjoyed a windfall US$25.9 billion in extra taxes, instead of handing out billions of dollars in refunds to the seven corporate giants.
The companies included in the study were oil corporation Chevron, communications company Verizon, financial giants JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup and manufacturers Ford, General Motor and Boeing.
Scott Klinger, from the Center for Effective Government told CBS those billions in tax refunds and corporate profits aren’t going towards creating U.S. jobs. Instead, he argued most big corporations are using free cash to reward stockholders with dividends and stock buybacks.
“We’ve seen this narrative that corporations are being disadvantaged by the tax systems, and there are a few companies that pay pretty high rates, like retailers, but there are others that use offshore tax loopholes and other extender bills to their full advantage,” he stated.
All but one of the companies studied have responded by maintaining they adhere to the U.S. tax laws.
Only JPMorgan Chase hadn’t commented at the time of writing, but Ford and General Motors told Reuters they paid lower taxes than usual in 2013 due to financial losses in past years.
Boeing told Reuters most of its 2013 taxes were differed due to production and development investments, while Verizon denied it pays its CEO figures anywhere near its federal tax contribution.
The report was released as corporations continue to urge legislators to renew dozens of elapsed tax breaks by the end of the year.
According to Guggenheim Securities senior policy analyst Chris Krueger, Congress is likely to renew a package of 55 tax breaks during the so-called lame duck congressional session, which ends in December.
“The fate of the 55 expired special interest tax breaks … will be the marquee legislative fight of the lame duck session,” Krueger stated.
Cuban brain drain, courtesy of the USA
| November 18, 2014 | 10:19 pm | Analysis, International, Latin America, National | Comments closed
NYTimes: A Cuban Brain Drain, Courtesy of U.S.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/opinion/a-cuban-brain-drain-courtesy-of-us.html?rref=opinion&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&pgtype=article

Secretary of State John Kerry and the American ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, have praised the work of Cuban doctors dispatched to treat Ebola patients in West Africa. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently sent an official to a regional meeting the Cuban government convened in Havana to coordinate efforts to fight the disease. In Africa, Cuban doctors are working in American-built facilities. The epidemic has had the unexpected effect of injecting common sense into an unnecessarily poisonous relationship.

And yet, Cuban doctors serving in West Africa today could easily abandon their posts, take a taxi to the nearest American Embassy and apply for a little-known immigration program that has allowed thousands of them to defect. Those who are accepted can be on American soil within weeks, on track to becoming United States citizens.

There is much to criticize about Washington’s failed policies toward Cuba and the embargo it has imposed on the island for decades. But the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, which in the last fiscal year enabled 1,278 Cubans to defect while on overseas assignments, a record number, is particularly hard to justify.

It is incongruous for the United States to value the contributions of Cuban doctors who are sent by their government to assist in international crises like the 2010 Haiti earthquake while working to subvert that government by making defection so easy.

American immigration policy should give priority to the world’s neediest refugees and persecuted people. It should not be used to exacerbate the brain drain of an adversarial nation at a time when improved relations between the two countries are a worthwhile, realistic goal.

The program was introduced through executive authority in August 2006, when Emilio González, a hard-line Cuban exile, was at the helm of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. Mr. González described the labor of Cuban doctors abroad as “state-sponsored human trafficking.” At the time, the Bush administration was trying to cripple the Cuban government. Easily enabling medical personnel posted abroad to defect represented an opportunity to strike at the core of the island’s primary diplomatic tool, while embarrassing the Castro regime.

Cuba has been using its medical corps as the nation’s main source of revenue and soft power for many years. The country has one of the highest numbers of doctors per capita in the world and offers medical scholarships to hundreds of disadvantaged international students each year, and some have been from the United States. According to Cuban government figures, more than 440,000 of the island’s 11 million citizens are employed in the health sector.

Havana gets subsidized oil from Venezuela and money from several other countries in exchange for medical services. This year, according to the state-run newspaper Granma, the government expects to make $8.2 billion from its medical workers overseas. The vast majority, just under
6,000, are posted in Latin America and the Caribbean. A few thousand are in 32 African countries.

Medical professionals, like most Cubans, earn meager wages. Earlier this year, the government raised the salaries of medical workers. Doctors now earn about $60 per month, while nurses make nearly $40. Overseas postings allows these health care workers to earn significantly more. Doctors in Brazil, for example, are making about $1,200 per month.

The 256 Cuban medical professionals treating Ebola patients in West Africa are getting daily stipends of roughly $240 from the World Health Organization. José Luis Di Fabio, the head of the W.H.O. in Havana, said he was confident the doctors and nurses dispatched to Africa have gone on their own volition. “It was voluntary,” Mr. Di Fabio, an Uruguayan whose organization has overseen their deployment, said in an interview. “Some backtracked at the last minute and there was no problem.”

Some doctors who have defected say they felt the overseas tours had an implicit element of coercion and have complained that the government pockets the bulk of the money it gets for their services. But the State Department says in its latest report on human trafficking that reported coercion of Cuban medical personnel does “not appear to reflect a uniform government policy.” Even so, the Cuban government would be wise to compensate medical personnel more generously if their work overseas is to remain the island’s economic bedrock.

Last year, the Cuban government liberalized its travel policies, allowing most citizens, including dissidents, to leave the country freely. Doctors, who in the past faced stricter travel restrictions than ordinary Cubans, no longer do. Some 20,000 Cubans are allowed to immigrate to the United States yearly. In addition, those who manage to arrive here in rafts or through border crossing points are automatically authorized to stay.


The Cuban government has long regarded the medical defection program as a symbol of American duplicity. It undermines Cuba’s ability to respond to humanitarian crises and does nothing to make the government in Havana more open or democratic. As long as this incoherent policy is in place, establishing a healthier relationship between the two nations will be harder.

Many medical professionals, like a growing number of Cubans, will continue to want to move to the United States in search of new opportunities, and they have every right to do so. But inviting them to defect while on overseas tours is going too far.
Hillary the Warmonger
| November 18, 2014 | 8:28 pm | Analysis, International, National | Comments closed

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS      COUNTERPUNCH

Glenn Greenwald has revealed that Hillary Clinton is the presidential candidate of the banksters and warmongers.    Pam and Russ Martens note that Elizabeth Warren is the populist alternative.    I doubt that a politician who represents the people can acquire the campaign funds needed to run a campaign.  If Warren becomes a threat, the Establishment will frame her with bogus charges and move her aside.
Hillary as president would mean war with Russia.  With neocon nazis such as Robert Kagan and Max Boot running her war policy and with Hillary’s comparison of Russia’s president Putin to Adolf Hitler, war would be a certainty.   As Michel Chossudovsky and Noam Chomsky have written, the war would be nuclear.
If Hillary is elected president, the financial gangsters and profiteering war criminals would complete their takeover of the country.  It would be forever or until armageddon.
To understand what we would be getting with Hillary, recall the Clinton presidency. The Clinton presidency was transformative in ways not generally recognized.  Clinton destroyed the Democratic Party with “free trade” agreements, deregulated the financial system, launched Washington’s ongoing policy of “regime change” with illegal military attacks on Yugoslavia and Iraq, and his regime used deadly force without cause against American civilians and covered up the murders with fake investigations.  These were four big changes that set the country on its downward spiral into a militarized police state with massive income and wealth inequality.
One can understand why Republicans wanted the North American Free Trade Agreement, but it was Bill Clinton who signed it into law.  “Free trade” agreements are devices used by US corporations to offshore their production of goods and services sold in American markets.  By moving production abroad, labor cost savings increase corporate profits and share prices, bringing capital gains to shareholders and multi-million dollar performance bonuses to executives.  The rewards to capital are large, but the rewards come at the expense of US manufacturing workers and the tax base of cities and states.
When plants are closed and the work shipped overseas, middle class jobs disappear.   Industrial and manufacturing unions are eviscerated, destroying the labor unions that financed the Democrats’ election campaigns.  The countervailing power of labor against capital was lost, and Democrats had to turn to the same sources of funding as Republicans.  The result is a one party state.
The weakened tax base of cities and states has made it possible for Republicans to attack the public sector unions.  Today the Democratic Party no longer exists as a political party financed by the union dues of ordinary people.  Today both political parties represent the interests of the same powerful interest groups:  the financial sector, the military/security complex, the Israel Lobby, the extractive industries, and agribusiness.
Neither party represents voters. Thus, the people are loaded up with the costs of financial bailouts and wars, while the extractive industries and Monsanto destroy the environment and degrade the food supply.  Elections no longer deal with real issues such as the loss of constitutional protections and a government accountable to law. Instead the parties compete on issues such as homosexual marriage and federal funding of abortion.
Clinton’s repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act was the initiating move followed by the removal of more constraints that allowed the financial system to transform itself into a gambling casino where bets are covered by the public and the Federal Reserve. The full consequences of this remain to be seen.
The Clinton regime’s attack on the Serbs was a war crime under international law, but it was the Yugoslavian president who tried to defend his country who was put on trial as a war criminal.  When the Clinton regime murdered Randy Weaver’s family at Ruby Ridge and 76 people at Waco, subjecting the few survivors to a show trial, the regime’s crimes against humanity went unpunished.  Thus did Clinton set the precedents for 14 years of Bush/Obama crimes against humanity in seven countries.  Millions of people have been killed, maimed, and displaced, and it is all acceptable.
It is easy enough for a government to stir up its population against foreigners as the successes of Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama demonstrate.  But the Clinton regime managed to stir up Americans against their fellows as well.  When the FBI gratuitously murdered Randy Weaver’s wife and young son, propagandistic denunciations of Randy Weaver took the place of accountability.  When the FBI attacked the Branch Davidians, a religious movement that split from the Seventh-day Adventist Church, with tanks and poison gas, causing a fire that burned 76 people, mainly women and children, to death, the mass murder was justified by the Clinton regime with wild and unsubstantiated charges against the government’s murdered victims.
All efforts to bring accountability to the crimes were blocked.  These were the precedents for the executive branch’s successful drive to secure immunity from law.  This immunity has now spread to local police who routinely abuse and murder US citizens on their streets and in their homes.
Washington’s international lawlessness about which the Russian and Chinese governments increasingly complain originated with the Clinton regime.  Washington’s lies about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” originated in the Clinton regime, as did the goal of “regime change” in Iraq and Washington’s illegal bombings and embargoes that costs the lives of 500,000 Iraqi children, lost lives that Clinton’s Secretary of State said were justified.
The US government had done wicked things in the past.  For example, the Spanish-American war was a grab for empire, and Washington has always protected the interests of US corporations from Latin American reformers, but the Clinton regime globalized the criminality.  Regime change has become reckless bringing with it danger of nuclear war.  It is no longer Grenada and Honduras whose governments are overthrown.  Today it is Russia and China that are targeted.
Former parts of Russia herself–Georgia and Ukraine–have been turned into Washington’s vassal states. Washington-financed NGOs organize “student protests” in Hong Kong, hoping that the protests will spread into China and destabilize the government.  The recklessness of these interventions in the internal affairs of nuclear powers is unprecedented.
Hillary Clinton is a warmonger, and so will be the Republican candidate.  The hardening anti-Russian rhetoric issuing from Washington and its punk EU puppet states places the world on the road to extinction.  The arrogant neoconservatives, with their hubristic belief that the US is the “exceptional and indispensable” country, would regard a deescalation of rhetoric and sanctions as backing down.  The more the neocons and politicians such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham escalate the rhetoric, the closer we come to war.
As the US government now embraces pre-emptive arrest and detention of those who might someday commit a crime, the entire cadre of neocon warmongers should be arrested and indefinitely detained before they destroy humanity.
The Clinton years produced a spate of books documenting the numerous crimes and coverups–the Oklahoma City bombing, Ruby Ridge, Waco, the FBI crime lab scandal, Vincent Foster’s death, CIA involvement in drug running, the militarization of law enforcement, Kosovo, you name it.  Most of these books are written from a libertarian or conservative viewpoint as no one realized while it was happening the nature of the transformation of American governance.  Those who have forgotten and those too young ever to have known owe it to themselves to acquaint or re-acquaint themselves with the Clinton years.  Recently I wrote about Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton.  Another book with substantial documentation is James Bovard’s Feeling Your Pain. Congress and the media aided and abetted the extensive coverups, focusing instead on the relatively unimportant Whitewater real estate deals and Clinton’s sexual affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Clinton and his corrupt regime lied about many important things, but only his lie about his affair with Monica Lewinsky caused the House of Representatives to impeach him.  By ignoring numerous substantial grounds for impeachment and selecting instead an insubstantial reason, Congress and the media were complicit in the rise of an unaccountable executive branch. This lack of accountability has brought us tyranny at home and war abroad, and these two evils are enveloping us all.
Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. Roberts’ How the Economy Was Lost is now available from CounterPunch in electronic format. His latest book is How America Was Lost.
BERNIE SANDERS ON IMMIGRATION REFORM AND KEYSTONE PIPELINE
| November 17, 2014 | 10:24 pm | Analysis, National | Comments closed
NOV. 17, 2014
from POLITICUS USA
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CUOMO [CNN REPORTER]:…Senator, great to have you on set here at NEW DAY. Let me ask you this. What’s your answer to the basic question of should the president do this?
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS, (I) VERMONT: Look, Chris, this country faces enormous problems. Our middle class is disappearing. We have more people living in poverty almost at any other time in the history of this country, and massive wealth and income inequality. And what we’ve seen over the last six years is Republicans doing hundreds and hundreds of filibusters. We passed legislation. We got a majority vote to raise the minimum wage, to do pay equity, to do a jobs program. Republicans filibustered, filibustered, and filibustered.
I think what the president is finally saying, look, immigration is a serious problem. We have got to do something. And if you guys don’t do it — remember, the Senate last year passed a reasonably good bill. What has the House done? Absolutely nothing. So what the president is saying, this country has problems. I’m going to go forward. If you pass legislation, I’ll rescind the executive order. But do something, address problems.
CAMEROTA [CNN]: Even if it means that by acting unilaterally he threatens the relationship for any possible compromise. If election meant that there was a new beginning that now they will once again be at loggerheads, there could be a government shutdown, and all the other ripple effect.
SANDERS: Threaten, compromise. Is that what you said?
CAMEROTA: Well —
SANDERS: For six years we are trying to get the Republicans to support anything. Look, the Republicans — I have to say I’m an independent. I’m not particularly partisan. But any objective observer understands they have become a right wing party, not a center-right party. They have a right wing base. They have an agenda can which does not want to work with the president.
And I think what the president is saying, look, we’ve got problems. We have got to move. To say that we’re going to break the wonderful harmony and working relationship that we’ve had six years, that did not exist.
CAMEROTA: It’s not that. It’s that they are threatening shutdown, that they won’t work with Democrats and the president if he were to do this.
SANDERS: Then the American people have to make a choice. If they think the government shutdown is a response to the enormous problems facing this country. Look, the American people in poll after poll and on Election Day said we could raise the minimum wage. Do you hear Republicans talking about that? The American people in poll after poll say women should get paid the same amount of money as men. Do you hear the Republicans talking about that? The American are disgusted with Citizens United.
CUOMO: They heard something, though, senator, because they just voted in the Republicans in a very big way. And I think there’s a political calculation here to be made. You’re certainly right about that. But there are a lot of lives in the balance.
What I don’t understand here is there’s an absence of leadership by the party and president. And by the party I mean the Democratic Party, because you can’t play the same game the Republicans are. You don’t have the leverage. So you’re dealing with need of these families being separated. Everybody should be able to agree that’s horrible. How does the party that you caucus with and leader of the country find a way to make that salable, which should not be so difficult?
SANDERS: Chris, I agree with you. It should not be so difficult. I think the vast majority of people in this country want immigration reform. We passed it in the Senate. We have kids who are born in this country that are going to see a situation if we don’t act that their parents may be expelled.
CUOMO: It’s happened before. Presidents Bush and Reagan both did this. But here’s the difference. The difference was that the Congress had been massaged in those two situations in the direction of the ultimate reform, so that when the president signed these executive orders stopping the families from being separated, Congress undid it quickly. They were moving that way. That leadership, that compromise has not been found here.
SANDERS: I don’t think it’s leadership and I don’t think it’s compromise. The Republican Party is today a very different party than it was back then. That’s just the simple reality. And you pay attention to this every day. Have you heard Republicans talking in a serious way about immigration reform? They have not.
So the president again on all of these issues, he is sitting there and saying, we have problems. We have got to act. And what he has said over and over again is if you pass legislation, I’ll rescind executive orders. Everybody knows executive orders are not the best way to do things. We know that. But you have a party now, I have to say this, which is really recalcitrant in terms of wanting to do much.
Sen. Sanders went on to explain to the CNN hosts why the Keystone pipeline is not a good idea, with host Chris Cuomo falsely arguing that the pipeline would lower U.S. dependence on foreign oil and create commerce.
The pro-Republican talking points were obvious. The idea that President Obama and Democrats have been unwilling to compromise. The false notion that Obama’s executive orders will poison the well and make it impossible for Republicans to pass an immigration bill. The whole mentality of Democrats lost so Republicans get to do whatever they want. These Republican talking points were all reflected in the questions that Sen. Sanders was asked.
Sanders knocked down every single Republican talking points based question with facts and history. In the media’s eyes, the six years of obstruction before the 2014 never happened. Sen. Sanders (I-VT) was correct to point out that John Boehner has refused to allow a vote on the Senate passed immigration reform bill.
The CNN interview demonstrated that the left is going to be battling both a Republican majority in Congress and the a corporate run media who will be cheering them on. Bernie Sanders brought the truth to CNN, and the rest of the left could learn a valuable lesson in how to handle the blame Obama media from the Vermont Independent.
Cause of Cuban 5 Is a Priority in Russia
| November 16, 2014 | 7:37 pm | Analysis, Cuban Five | Comments closed
 
Moscow, Nov 16 (Prensa Latina) Fernando Gonzalez, vice president of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), stated on Sunday that the struggle for the release of three Cuban compatriots still held in U.S. prisons is a priority for the Russians.

About to conclude his visit to Russia, Gonzalez, who is also a Hero of the Republic of Cuba, told Prensa Latina that he felt a deep sentiment of solidarity for Gerardo Hernandez, Antonio Guerrero and Ramon Labañino.

They, as well as Fernando Gonzalez and Rene Gonzalez, were sentenced to lengthy prison terms that included several life sentences, for trying to prevent violent actions against their homeland, planned on U.S. territory.

While Hernandez, Labañino and Guerrero remain in prison in the United States, Fernando and Rene returned home after completing their prison sentences of more than 15 years.

The ICAP vice president thanked the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for expressing solidarity with the Cuban 5, to whom he referred as “my brothers.”

From the official viewpoint, the two resolutions approved unanimously on two occasions by the State Duma (lower house of parliament) are actions for which we feel the need to thank during the visit, he added.

That was the main objective of the meeting at the Duma, where we were received by Chairman Sergei Narishkin and First Deputy Chairman Ivan Melnikov. Both officials devoted more time than expected to us, despite their many occupations, Gonzalez said

He stated that all meetings held by the delegation received the commitment by legislators and activists to continuing struggling with new initiatives until Gerardo, Ramon and Antonio can return to their homeland.

Gonzalez is leading a delegation that attended the festivities on the 50th anniversary of the Russia-Cuba Friendship Society.

Cosmonaut Arnaldo Tamayo, president of the Russia-Cuba Friendship Society, Doctor Aleida Guevara, founder of that solidarity association along with Yuri Gagarin on the Russian side, and Gladys Ayllon, director of ICAP’s Europe Department, accompanied Gonzalez.

jg/iff/jpm
Modificado el ( domingo, 16 de noviembre de 2014 )
Hillary is good for the Holy Land, but not for us
| November 16, 2014 | 7:30 pm | Analysis, National | Comments closed
PROGRESO WEEKLY
It’s easy to strike a pose of cynicism when contemplating Hillary Clinton’s inevitable (and terribly imminent) presidential campaign. As a drearily soulless, principle-free, power-hungry veteran of DC’s game of thrones, she’s about as banal of an American politician as it gets. One of the few unique aspects to her, perhaps the only one, is how the genuinely inspiring gender milestone of her election will (following the Obama model) be exploited to obscure her primary role as guardian of the status quo.
That she’s the beneficiary of dynastic succession – who may very well be pitted against the next heir in line from the regal Bush dynasty (this one, not yet this one) – makes it all the more tempting to regard #HillaryTime with an evenly distributed mix of boredom and contempt. The tens of millions of dollars the Clintons have jointly “earned” off their political celebrity - much of it speaking to the very globalists, industry groups, hedge funds, and other Wall Street appendages who would have among the largest stake in her presidency - make the spectacle that much more depressing (the likely candidate is pictured above with Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein at an event in September).
But one shouldn’t be so jaded. There is genuine and intense excitement over the prospect of (another) Clinton presidency. Many significant American factions regard her elevation to the Oval Office as an opportunity for rejuvenation, as a stirring symbol of hope and change, as the vehicle for vital policy advances. Those increasingly inspired factions include:
Wall Street
Down on Wall Street they don’t believe (Clinton’s populist rhetoric) for a minute. While the finance industry does genuinely hate Warren, the big bankers love Clinton, and by and large they badly want her to be president. Many of the rich and powerful in the financial industry—among them, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, Tom Nides, a powerful vice chairman at Morgan Stanley, and the heads of JPMorganChase and Bank of America—consider Clinton a pragmatic problem-solver not prone to populist rhetoric. To them, she’s someone who gets the idea that we all benefit if Wall Street and American business thrive. What about her forays into fiery rhetoric? They dismiss it quickly as political maneuvers. None of them think she really means her populism.
Although Hillary Clinton has made no formal announcement of her candidacy, the consensus on Wall Street is that she is running—and running hard—and that her national organization is quickly falling into place behind the scenes. That all makes her attractive. Wall Street, above all, loves a winner, especially one who is not likely to tamper too radically with its vast money pot.
According to a wide assortment of bankers and hedge-fund managers I spoke to for this article, Clinton’s rock-solid support on Wall Street is not anything that can be dislodged based on a few seemingly off-the-cuff comments in Boston calculated to protect her left flank. (For the record, she quickly walked them back, saying she had “short-handed” her comments about the failures of trickle-down economics by suggesting, absurdly, that corporations don’t create jobs.) “I think people are very excited about Hillary,” says one Wall Street investment professional with close ties to Washington. “Most people in New York on the finance side view her as being very pragmatic. I think they have confidence that she understands how things work and that she’s not a populist.”
The Israel Lobby
Should she become president, on one level, better ties with Israel are virtually guaranteed. . . . Let’s not forget that the Clintons dealt with Bibi too as prime minister. It was never easy. But clearly it was a lot more productive than what we see now. . . . To put it simply, as a more conventional politician, Hillary is good on Israel and relates to the country in a way this president doesn’t. . . .  Hillary is from a different generation and functioned in a political world in which being good on Israel was both mandatory and smart.
Let’s be clear. When it comes to Israel, there is no Bill Clinton 2.0. The former president is probably unique among presidents for the depth of his feeling for Israel and his willingness to put aside his own frustrations with certain aspects of Israel’s behavior, such as settlements. But this accommodation applies to Hillary too. Both Bill and Hillary are so enamored with the idea of Israel and its unique history that they are prone to make certain allowances for the reality of Israel’s behavior, such as the continuing construction of settlements.
Interventionists (i.e., war zealots)
But Exhibit A for what Robert Kagan describes as his “mainstream” view of American force is his relationship with former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who remains the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes. 
Mr. Kagan pointed out that he had recently attended a dinner of foreign-policy experts at which Mrs. Clinton was the guest of honor, and that he had served on her bipartisan group of foreign-policy heavy hitters at the State Department, where his wife worked as her spokeswoman.
“I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy,” Mr. Kagan said, adding that the next step after Mr. Obama’s more realist approach “could theoretically be whatever Hillary brings to the table” if elected president. “If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue,” he added, “it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”
Old school neocons
After nearly a decade in the political wilderness, the neoconservative movement is back. . . . Even as they castigate Mr. Obama, the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy. . . .
Other neocons have followed [Robert] Kagan’s careful centrism and respect for Mrs. Clinton. Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted in The New Republic this year that “it is clear that in administration councils she was a principled voice for a strong stand on controversial issues, whether supporting the Afghan surge or the intervention in Libya.”
And the thing is, these neocons have a point. Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq war; supported sending arms to Syrian rebels; likened Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, to Adolf Hitler; wholeheartedly backs Israel; and stresses the importance of promoting democracy.
It’s easy to imagine Mrs. Clinton’s making room for the neocons in her administration. No one could charge her with being weak on national security with the likes of Robert Kagan on board. . . . Far from ending, then, the neocon odyssey is about to continue. In 1972, Robert L. Bartley, the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal and a man who championed the early neocon stalwarts, shrewdly diagnosed the movement as representing “something of a swing group between the two major parties.” Despite the partisan battles of the early 2000s, it is remarkable how very little has changed.
So take that, cynics. There are pockets of vibrant political excitement stirring in the land over a Hillary Clinton presidency. There are posters being made, buttons being appended, checks being prepared, appointments being coveted. The joint, allied, synergistic constituencies of plutocracy and endless war have their beloved candidate. And it’s really quite difficult to argue that their excitement and affection are unwarranted.
Why the Right Keeps Winning and the Left Keeps Losing
| November 12, 2014 | 8:48 pm | Analysis, National | Comments closed

http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/why-the-right-keeps-winning-and-the-left-keeps-losing

November 10, 2014

Salon.com recently published my analysis of why the Right keeps winning. You can read it online here. Below is a slightly updated version of that analysis, which you can also read online here.  Please share this via Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, send it out to any lists you are on, and post it on your own website. In the wake of the 2014 elections, I see many people retreating into despair or denying that there really was a decisive loss in the midterms, but I have not seen many progressives offering new strategies to alter the political landscape. The strategy I outline below has not been tried during the last forty years of our country moving more to the right than to the left. If you agree with what I’m proposing below, help me create this discussion in your hometown as a first step toward reversing the increasing dominance of the Right.

Why does the Right keep winning in American politics, sometimes through electoral victories, sometimes by having the Democrats and others on the Left adopt what were traditionally right-wing policies and perspectives? Sure, I know that progressives won some important local battles in 2014: A few towns in California, Texas, and Ohio banned fracking. A few towns in Ohio, Massachusetts, Florida, and Illinois supported ballot measures to overturn Citizens United. Richmond, California, stood up to Chevron, and Berkeley stood up to “Big Soda.”

But the overall direction of the country for the past forty years has given increasing strength to right-wing politicians in the Republican Party and opportunists in the Democratic Party who effectively do much of the same work that these right-wingers would do when they win political power. So why has this been happening? And why do so many people end up voting to elect politicians who are committed to enacting policies that hurt the economic well-being of a significant section (not the majority, but many) of the people who voted for them?

I asked this question first to thousands of people whom my research team and I encountered when I was Principal Investigator for an NIMH-sponsored study about how to deal with stress at work and stress in family life. At the time Ronald Reagan was president and he had won in part by winning many votes of middle-income working people.

The answer given by the media then, and often proffered today as well by the Democrats is, “It’s the economy, stupid.” They didn’t give that explanation up when Reaganomics produced heavy economic losses for working people who continued to vote Republican, and they didn’t give that explanation up when the Clinton/Gore years produced a booming economy and yet Gore lost (OK, he won but for the Supreme Court, but that was only made possible because of how close the vote was—and why would it have been so close if “the economy” is the determining issue?)

Nor am I convinced when recent statisticians show that those with the least income give ten votes to Democrats to every eight they give to Republicans, thus supposedly showing that people always vote their economic interests. The issue remains: those whose economic interests are not served by a politics that caters to the wealthy (those eight who vote Republican when the Republicans over and over again try to dismantle economic programs that might help them) continue to support those politicians, and that gives the Right the electoral edge it would never have on the grounds of its policies (most people who vote for them, according to recent polls, don’t agree with their specific policy positions).

What my research team discovered was the following:

1. Most Americans work in an economy that teaches them the common sense of global capitalism: “Everyone is out for themselves and will seek to advance their own interests without regard to your well-being, so the only rational path is for you to seek to advance your own interests in the same way. Those who have more money and power than you have are just better at seeking their own self-interest, because this is a meritocratic society in which you end up where you deserve to end up, so stop whining about the differences in wealth and power, because if you deserved more you would have more.”

2. Now here is the central contradiction: most people hate this kind of reality. They believe that it is in stark contrast to the values they would like to live by but simultaneously they also believe that the logic of capitalist society is the only possible reality, and that they would be fools not to try to live by it in every part of their lives. This message is reinforced in our workplaces and also by almost every sitcom and television news story available. But most people hate that this is the case. They often will tell you, “Everyone is selfish and materialistic, so I’d be a fool to be the one person who is caring for others in a world where everyone is just out for themselves.” Unconsciously, many people adopt the values of the marketplace, and these values have a corrosive impact on their own friendships, relationships, and family life.

3. So when many Americans encounter a different reality in right-wing churches that have specialized in creating supportive communities, they feel much more addressed there than they’ve ever felt in progressive movements that focus on economic entitlements or political rights and sometimes disintegrate due to internal tensions over dynamics of relative privilege and unproductive feelings of guilt. Only rarely do these liberal or progressive movements actually manifest a loving community that seems to care specifically about the people who come to their public talks or gatherings—the experience is more about hearing a good speech than about encountering people who want to know who you are and what you need—precisely what happens in most right-wing churches.

Is it really a surprise that people who so rarely encounter this kind of caring among the people with whom they work or the people whom they see angling for power or sexual conquest in the movies and TV would feel more seen and recognized for having some value in the Right than in much of the Left? Sadly, the cost of belonging to those right-wing churches is this: that they demean or put-down those deemed to be “Other”—those who are not part of their community. These “others” (including feminists, African Americans, immigrants, gays and lesbians, and increasingly all liberals) are blamed for the ethos of selfishness and breakdown of loving relationships and families. This is ironic because in fact the breakdown of loving relationships is largely a product of the increasing internalization of the utilitarian or instrumental way people have come to view each other, a product of bringing home into personal life, friendships, and marriages the very values that the Right esteems and champions in the competitive economy.

4. The Democrats, and most of the Left, have little understanding of this dynamic and rarely position themselves as the voice challenging the values of the marketplace or the instrumental way of thinking that is the produce of the materialism and selfishness of the competitive marketplace.  So even when facing huge political setbacks, as in the 2014 midterm elections, you will hear the smartest of liberals and progressives acknowledging that what is needed is some kind of unifying worldview that the Democrats have failed to articulate in the six years that they have occupied the White House and had the majority in the House of Representatives. They imagine that if they can put forward a pro-working class economic program, that will be sufficient to change the dynamics of American politics.

They are right that they need a coherent vision, but it can’t solely be an economic populism. What people need to hear is an account of the way the suffering they experience in their personal lives, the breakdown of families, the loneliness and inability to trust other people, the sense of being surrounded by selfish and materialistic people, and the self-blaming they experience when their own relationships feel less fulfilling than they had hoped for are all a product of the triumph of the way people have internalized the values of the capitalist marketplace. This suffering can only be overcome when the capitalist system itself is replaced by one based on love, caring, kindness, generosity and a New Bottom Line that no longer judges corporations, government policies, or social institutions as “efficient,” “productive” or “rational” solely by the extent to which they maximize money or power. Instead, liberals and progressives need to be advocating a New Bottom Line that focuses on how much any given institution or economic or social policy or practice tends to maximize our capacities to be loving and caring, kind and generous, environmentally responsible, and capable of transcending a narrow utilitarian attitude toward other human beings and capable of responding to the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur and beauty of all that is.

Progressives inside and outside the Democratic Party need to develop a Spiritual Covenant that can apply this New Bottom Line to every aspect of our society—our economy, our corporations, our educational system, our legal system. In short, a progressive worldview that deeply rejects the way most of our institutions today teach people the values of “looking out for number one” and maximizing one’s own material well being without regard to the consequences for others or for the environment. Armed with an alternative worldview, progressives would have a chance of helping working people stop blaming themselves for their situation, stop blaming some other, and see that it is the whole system that needs a fundamental makeover.

But many liberals and progressives are religiophobic and thus believe that talk of love and caring is mere psycho-babble. As a result they cede to the Right the values issues rather than providing an alternative set of values in which love and generosity and caring for the Earth would take center place. We in the Network of Spiritual Progressives have developed a model of what it would look like to put values such as love and caring into political practice. Doing so would include implementing a Global Marshall Plan and passing an Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The latter amendment would require that all state and federal elections be financed solely through public funding—all other monies would be totally banned. The amendment would also require any corporation with an income above $50 million/year that is operating or selling its services or products within the U.S. to get a new corporate charter once every five years. Such charters would only be granted to those that could prove a satisfactory history of environmental and social responsibility to a panel of ordinary citizens who would also hear the testimony of people around the world who have been impacted by the policies, behavior, and advertising of those corporations. We in the Network of Spiritual Progressives have also begun professional task forces to envision what each profession would look like if they were in fact governed by The New Bottom Line. Read more at spiritualprogressives.org.

The environmental movement had the possibility of helping people make this transition in consciousness had it focused more on helping people see that the planet is not just an economic “resource,” but a living being that nurtures and sustains life and which appropriately would engender awe, wonder, and radical amazement, and hence celebration of the universe of which it is a part. But in order to be “realistic,” most major environmental organizations, and even most of the local anti-fracking and local-oriented environmental initiatives have avoided this spiritual dimension, instead framing their issues in narrow self-interest terms that are then countered by the supporters of fracking, pipelines, and other environmentally destructive approaches by pointing out that these approaches can generate jobs and revenues. Stick to framing things on narrow and short-term material self-interest terms, and the corporate apologists have a plausible if misleading argument. It’s only when you address the environment in terms of the New Bottom Line that you can provide a way to reach people who otherwise get attracted to the arguments of the Right.

What the Left keeps on missing is that people have a set of spiritual needs—for a life of meaning and purpose that transcends the logic of the competitive marketplace and its ethos of materialism and selfishness, for communities that address those needs, and for loving friends and families that are best sustained when they share some higher vision than self-interest. The reason that the gay and lesbian struggle for marriage equality went from seeming impossibly utopian to winning in a majority of states in a very short while was that the proponents of that struggle switched their rhetoric from “we demand our equal rights” to “we are loving people who want our love to flourish and be supported in this society.” That same kind of switch toward higher values and purpose, and touching into our shared desire for loving and caring world, could make the Left a winner again, instead of a consistent loser.

5. Nothing alienates middle-income working people more than the usual reason progressives and liberals give for why they are losing elections or failing to gain more support for their programs: namely, that Americans are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, or just plain dumb. Most Americans may not know the details of the programs put forward by political movements or parties, by they know when they are being demeaned, and that is precisely what gives the Right the ability to describe the Left as “elitist,” thereby obscuring the way right-wing politics serves the real elites of wealth and power.

And then radio and TV right-wingers effectively mobilize the anger and frustration people feel at living in a society where love and caring are so hard to come by—against the Left! This is the ultimate irony: the capitalist marketplace generates a huge amount of anger, but with its meritocratic fantasy it convinces people that it is their own failings that are to blame for why their lives don’t feel more fulfilling. So that anger is internalized and manifests in alcoholism, drug abuse, violence in families, high rates of divorce, road rage, and support for militaristic ventures around the world.

The Right mobilizes this anger—and directs it against liberals and progressives. And that actually feels great for many people, because it relieves their self-blaming and allows them to express their frustrations (though sadly at the wrong targets). Only a movement that understands all these dynamics, and can help people understand that their anger is appropriate but that it is wrongly directed can progressives hope to win against the Right.

But instead of addressing that anger against the political and economic system, the Democrats are often seen as champions of the exiting system (and not mistakenly when President Obama seems more interested in serving the interests of the 1 percent than in challenging the distortions of the banks and the investment companies and the powerful corporations. All the worse that after the 2014 election, Obama is once again talking about finding common ground with the Republicans—that has guided his policies for the past six years. Democrats keep on thinking that if they look more like the Right, they’ll win more credibility. All they win is the disdain of the majority.

6. As if all this weren’t bad enough, the Obama presidency has put the final blow to liberals and progressives by eliciting hope in a different kind of world, then capitulating to the special interests. People who allowed themselves to hope in 2008 may need decades of recovery time till they can again believe in any political path—or we need psycho-spiritual progressive therapists who can help us build an alternative both insides and outside the Democratic Party. We need to speak honestly about this disillusionment and help people feel less humiliated that they believed in Obama’s rhetoric of hope. And we need to show that many people who at first seem impossibly right-wing actually want a world of love and caring too, and have never heard liberals and progressives speak that kind of language.

7. The first step in recovery is to create large public gatherings at which liberals and progressives can mourn our losses, acknowledge the many mistakes we’ve made in the past decades, and then develop a strategy for how most effectively to challenge the assumptions of the capitalist marketplace that are shared by too many who otherwise think of themselves as progressives. Without this kind of a recovery process, we are likely to end up with more and deeper despair in 2016 and beyond.

Our Network of Spiritual Progressives is taking a step in this direction by trying to reach out to people in every ethnicity, race, and faith or atheist community, and inviting you to the University of San Francisco in San Francisco, California, on December 14 for a one-day gathering (starting after church to respect those who go to pray on Sunday mornings) to discuss these issues and to start developing a winning strategy for healing and transforming our world. We will post more info at spiritualprogressives.org starting next week (November 20).

If you live in another state and want to attend something like this, then work to assemble a large group of people. If you do so, we will come to your part of the country to shape a discussion of this sort for the people you know. We need hundreds of such meetings to help reorient the liberal and progressive forces, not discounting all that they are doing, but only seeking to help them integrate into that work a shared worldview (the New Bottom Line) and a psycho-spiritual sensitivity that will make them far more effective.

We’re happy to also publicize other gatherings sponsored in any place in the United States where people are willing to see how badly we need a fundamental rethinking of the assumptions that have led liberals and progressives to become so unsuccessful in capturing the imagination and loyalty of the American people.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun, author of the national bestseller The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right, and chair of the interfaith and secular-humanist welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives. He invites readers who agree with this proposal to contact him at rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com to begin to implement with him this strategy for societal healing and transformation.

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