A Gilded Planet

It occurs to me that in my last two betamax posts, I have made fairly showy references to two major rappers in a way that makes my love of hip hop rather conspicuous. It's true that I had a rather torrid affair with hip hop this summer. I discovered that Jay-Z is all of the following (using his words not mine): the "ruler,"  the "best-rapper-alive," an "American Gangster," a "black superhero," a "muhfuckin' renegade," as "real as it gets" (which is why they "feel him in the favelas in Brazil" since as you know "real recognize real"), made "from the cloth of the Kennedys" etcetera, etcetera. Here's a guy who apparently has the President of the United States "on the text" and is not afraid to tell the whole world about it. I have absolutely nothing in common with this giant who is from "the murder capital where [he] murders for capital" and yet I listen to his rhymes ...

This weekend's House vote to pass historic health care reform legislation sends President Obama's central domestic policy priority sailing towards the legislative end zone. In addition, the House passed major energy/environment legislation earlier this year, another major Obama agenda item. Both bills now await consideration on the floor of the United States Senate. As we work to push our Senators to do the right thing on both bills, it would be wise to keep the recent comments offered by Chris Hayes in mind: The filibuster has become a cancer growing inside the world's greatest deliberative body. What was once a rarely invoked procedural mechanism has metastasized and turned into a de facto supermajority requirement for any legislation. In the 103rd Congress (1993-94) there were forty-six votes on "cloture," the motion to override a filibuster and allow something to be considered on the floor. In the last Congress, the 110th, the first one in which Republicans w...

Last Friday, President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize as a call to action rather than a reward for prior accomplishments. If you haven't watched his remarks yet, you should . While he takes some measure of credit for his work towards ending the Iraq War, he appears uncomfortable when speaking about Afghanistan. This is a good thing. He realizes the dissonance of accepting a Peace Prize while conducting a war in Afghanistan that many are urging him to escalate. This call to action should inform his decisions moving forward. It's easy to prattle on about the Nobel Committee's process of selection ( Hendrik Hertzberg and Howard Zinn offer the best attempts). Holding the leader of the most powerful nation on earth accountable for the advancement of the cause of peace is much harder. But it is what we must do if we want peace.

I'm working on a longer post about the current status of the U.S. economy, but I want to quickly note that Ryan Lizza's article for the New Yorker, though impeccably written, is really quite lacking as far as good piece of reporting goes. As a puff piece designed to burnish the reputation of Larry Summers, it gets four stars. But I expect a lot more from the New Yorker than that. For more on the problems with Lizza's profile, check out what Dean Baker and Matt Yglesias have to say. Paul Krugman has an interesting take as well. I do want to try to clear up some fuzzy thinking about economic policy that appeared in New Yorker and that Nikhil Dixit over at the Cal Dems blog seemed to commend in his post: Yes, unemployment is rising, but that doesn’t mean the stimulus is a failure. It wasn’t designed to stop job loss altogether. Rather, it was designed as a backstop. Don’t ask what unemployment is now, ask what it would have been without the stimulus (FYI, most economists ...

I know, it's hard to believe. But contrary to what you may have presumed from constantly hearing about the hijinks of Glenn Beck, Michael Steele and Michelle "I only stopped ranting against the US Census after a census worker was murdered for doing his job in Kentucky" Bachmann, there are still serious conservatives out there making smart, intellectually honest arguments. They've just been completely marginalized. But Tyler Cowen describes one of the most disturbing trends in our polity as skillfully as any progressive: FOR years now, many businesses and individuals in the United States have been relying on the power of government, rather than competition in the marketplace, to increase their wealth...Lately the surviving major banks have reported brisk profits, yet in large part this reflects astute politicking and lobbying rather than commercial skill. Much of the competition was cleaned out by bank failures and consolidation, so giants like Goldman Sachs and JPMo...

Antiwar activists, foreign policy realists and fans of Woodrow Wilson's principle of national self-determination should celebrate as the New York Times reports that many within both the Obama Administration and the military are skeptical of General Stanley McChrystal's plan to escalate the eight-year-old war in Afghanistan with a massive new commitment of additional troops and resources. It seems that the president is considering other options for moving forward in Afghanistan, including focusing a smaller number of troops on fighting terrorists rather than a directing larger number of troops to undertake a long-term project of nation-building with a necessarily imperialistic character. I am ecstatic at this news. It shows that the White House is realistic about its approach to the Middle East but more importantly it demonstrates that there are people in the Obama Administration who are seriously opposed to an indefinite occupation of the Middle East on the basis of muddily de...

Imagine your ideal health insurance plan. First of all, it’s there when you need it; so when you get sick, you get care. It can’t be cancelled because of a loophole. It allows you to make your own health care decisions with consultation from your doctor and no interference from insurance company bureaucrats. It won’t discriminate against you because of gender or a preexisting condition. It’s affordable, which means no exorbitant out-of-pocket expenses, deductibles or co-pays. There’s also no arbitrary cap on how much care you can get over your lifetime or in any given year. It doesn’t disappear if you lose your job and it doesn’t change if you change jobs. And it fully covers all check-ups and tests that helps you avoid getting sick in the fist place. The Medicare-like public insurance plan included in the bill that has passed four out of five congressional committees and the health care agenda that President Obama campaigned on last fall fits the ideal health insurance plan I describe...

Earlier this year, President Obama asked Congress to send him legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America. Democratic leaders in Congress have been quick to respond. The House of Representatives has already passed a major climate and energy bill that will transform our energy economy. The US Senate is taking the proposal up as you read this. But even as the wheels of progress have begun to move the country forward, a growing chorus on the right have begun to challenge the president’s ambitious agenda as bad for American business and therefore bad for the American consumer. Setting legal limits on the allowable amounts of climate change pollution seems to attract controversy despite its firm grounding in the longstanding tradition of using regulation to preserve public goods. The public has long supported – by large margins – regulating the dangerous byproducts produced by the burning of fossil fuels in ord...

President Obama has set a clear goal of comprehensive health care reform before the end of this year. He has boldly determined that deferring urgent changes to the American health care system cannot wait another year. But in accomplishing this goal, Congress has a responsibility to make sure health care reform serves the public interest and not the narrow goals of Washington lobbyists. In the growing debate over President Obama's health care plan, insurance companies have made very clear their opposition to the provision of the option of an afforable public health insurance plan to every American. This opposition is based entirely on the insurance industry's fear that a viable public insurance option will cut into the potential future profits of the industry. From the beginning of the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama has argued that every American has right to an affordable health insurance plan that will be there when it's needed. The not-for-profit, Medicare-like ...