Mary Green Swig, Steven L. Swig, and Roger Hickey announce that "For the Student Debt Movement, JUBILEE Is an Old Idea Made New." Those of you who shudder at the "moral hazard" of forgiving debts need only contemplate these statements: "It is immoral to place more debt on a people than they can reasonably handle," while "(t)oday jubilee only seems to be available to the wealthy and powerful, with broad forms of corporate debt and tax forgiveness and surprisingly large corporate subsidies from the government." Seems to me there's your moral hazard. And it is odd that so many "religious" politicians have never spoken of a jubilee.
Chris Morran at the Consumerist describes "Four Reasons Tribal Lands Lack Better Access to the Internet" according to the Government Accountability Office. While I have no doubt that low incomes, less skill in navigating complex bureaucracies, and lack of coordination between those bureaucracies all play a part, "remote location" and "uneven terrain" sure do sound like the kind of hurdles our big corporate entrepreneurs can't seem to overcome even though they're obscenely rich and always telling us what great problem-solvers they are.
Seth Ackerman, writing at Jacobin, notes the irony that nominally liberal pundits, who declared in 2008 that details-don't-matter when considering the health care plans of then-Senators Clinton and Obama, now find "details" of the utmost importance when considering the health care plan of Bernie Sanders. Mr. Ackerman's piece absolute eviscerates the "evolution" of the health-care thinking of both Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein, circa 2007 and now -- the more you read, the more crushing their hypocrisy will seem to be. (Presumably a response from both men will be coming, and I bet they nibble interminably at the margins of Mr. Ackerman's argument.) I offer this link just in case you were thinking politically-driven hypocrisy was only a right-wing phenomenon.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof also has "Two Questions for Bernie Sanders." You won't be surprised by either of them, but you may be taken aback, for example, by his blunt statement that Medicare-for-All "won't happen," even though Mr. Kristof is "for it"! Well, that's not the attitude that abolished slavery! Two questions for Mr. Kristof: if so many Americans -- the majority, as polls consistently tell us -- want Medicare-for-all, why is it impossible to achieve? And what does that say about us?
And finally, Norm Ornstein, writing at The Atlantic, tells us "Why Bernie Sanders Can't Govern." I'll give him credit, at least, for tackling the problem head-on: that if Republicans obstructed his aims as President, which they will, Mr. Sanders would simply "go to the public" and try to "force members of Congress to their knees, shifting the debate and the agenda his way." Mr. Ornstein, of course, argues that "going over the head of Congress" in this manner doesn't work, but he doesn't offer enough evidence (i.e., of Presidents "going over the head of Congress" and failing) to support that argument -- and citing, especially, George W. Bush's attempt to get the people to go along with something so vastly unpopular as Social Security privatization actually undercuts his argument. Besides, I've seen it happen -- anti-media consolidation, pro-overtime, and pro-net neutrality efforts have succeeded in America not because Congress and the President could "work together," but because the people demanded them. Seems the very soul of populism, that. (And, yes, net neutrality got a big boost from President Obama in late 2014, even if he was muscling the FCC and not Congress at that moment.)
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