Month: May 2015

Republicans Stick to Their Disingenuous Script to Blame Obama for Syria Debate (September 3, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

obama-boehner

Last Sunday, as I sat listening to Secretary of State John Kerry repeatedly assert “I don’t believe that my former colleagues in the United States Senate and the House will turn their backs on all of our interests, on the credibility of our country, on the norm with respect to the enforcement of the prohibition against the use of chemical weapons, which has been in place since 1925,” I pitied his position. As the discouraging parliamentary vote in the UK, the reluctance of the United Nations and the anemic support of the beleaguered American people left President Obama increasingly isolated in his intent to address the human atrocities committed by the Syrian government, it fell to Kerry to do a very awkward rhetorical dance: making a clear and impassioned case for intervention while stopping short of sending our soldiers into another unpopular, unsanctioned military action.

From a tactical standpoint, I applaud the decision to seek Congressional approval for any limited action in the war torn nation, where various estimated now place the civilian death toll at over 100,000. Back in the heady days of yore when the two parties were able to come to agreement on something, anything, this was the paradigm. I believe most of the nation agreed with Kerry, appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, when he said “The United States is strongest when the Congress speaks with the president, when the American people are invested.”

At the same time, I had to wonder if Kerry had lost complete touch with reality when he left the Senate for his new role in January of this year. In declaring his belief in the legislative branch’s commitment to our interests and credibility, a highly selective memory is required to forget the doings of the 113thU.S. Congress…or the 112th, or the 111th.

I understand that an authorization of military action would normally seem like the proverbial shooting of fish in the barrel when it comes to the strong war hawk arm of the GOP, but these are not conventional times. Indeed, as our own Sarah Jonespoints out “Republicans are once again unable to govern seriously due to their Obama Opposition Disorder and their inner party destruction.” Thus we are dealing with a party that, once upon a time, couldn’t rush to war and the securing of pork-laden security contracts fast enough under a Republican President, a group that lauded the expanded powers of the Executive Branch to make fairly unilateral decisions regarding the deployment of armed forces. Substitute a Democratic Chief Executive with a brown face and suddenly we have several days of “Will they or won’t they?” suspense. It’s ludicrous.

Fortunately for Syria’s destroyed and injured families, it appears that the most inept Speaker of the House in modern history (I might have just left it at “history,” but I confess myself ignorant of those of the 18th and 19th centuries), might just be able to herd the screeching, disagreeable cats that make up his caucus. The New York Times reported that “Speaker John A. Boehner said on Tuesday that he would ‘support the president’s call to action’ in Syria after meeting with President Obama, giving the president a crucial ally in the quest for votes in the House.”

But of course since no Republican can ever be allowed to risk offering the POTUS unqualified support for a just action, here’s number two House Republican Eric Cantor right on cue: “Understanding that there are differing opinions on both sides of the aisle, it is up to President Obama to make the case to Congress and to the American people that this is the right course of action, and I hope he is successful in that endeavor.”

So if the vote fails, it’s not, Cantor repeats, not another act of GOP cynicism and blame shifting. It is simply that President Obama will have failed to make a compelling case that our intervention in the region will save lives and buttress American interests. Apparently iron clad proof of chemical attacks seen on news stations across the globe, Syria’s importance in managing ongoing tensions with Iran and the larger Middle East and the support of tried and true Obama enemies like Arizona John McCain, may still not be enough to get this group behind anything at all that the President wishes to do.

I must admit that I am not entirely sure where I stand on the Syria question. I believe with all my heart that someone has to stop the killing, but at the same time, I’m well aware of the lessons recent history offers with regard to American-advocated regime change (Iraq, Libya, Egypt, etc). I’ve become fairly convinced that reinvention and democratization must be the will of the people in order to become sustainable. But limited efforts to divest Assad of his chemical weapons stock should be a no-brainer, especially on the part of the “we’ll be greeted as liberators” right.

American Women Still Have a Dream That the GOP Can’t Silence (August 28, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

women-dream

During this historically important week, the nation marks the half century anniversary of the March on Washington, punctuated by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s eternally inspirational “I Have a Dream” speech. This lofty, idealistic piece of rhetoric dared to imagine a future of peace and equality for all, no longer an exclusive privilege of white male ideology reproducers. The message was simple but stirring: let’s pretend that when the Founding Fathers asserted the equal creation of all men, they meant men of all races and means. Then let’s make it a reality.

But what about women? Where does this more than 50 percent of the American population stand in 2013? While it’s undeniable that female voters have made great strides in education and earning potential, with women having accrued an astonishing 10 million more college degrees than men since 1982, and a number of surveys reporting that women are now the primary breadwinners in 40 percent of American households, as Rodney Dangerfield might have quipped, in certain sociopolitical circles, the ladies still “get no respect.”

This is not simple argument or conjecture. Sadly, evidence abounds that 2013 looks an awful lot like 1950 when it comes to female reproductive rights, rape culture and other issues critical to our survival. I logged onto Politicus USA this morning and two of the first five stories in the newsfeed related to the continued discrimination against and subjugation of women. Writer Keith Brekus examines the case of a 50 year-old man sentenced to a mere month in jail after repeatedly raping a 14 year-old girl. Adalia Woodbury takes a chilling look at North Carolina’s female voter suppression tactics.

I love being a woman, and society’s oppressive attitudes notwithstanding, I wouldn’t trade genders for the world. But sometimes it’s hard to account for modern peonage imposed upon my sex, to myself as well as my young nieces. 15 years ago, the Spice Girls played a role in teaching my generation to celebrate “Girl Power,” but those messages are increasingly harder to filter against an appalling tide of backward looking policy and discourse.

The conservative media, as usual, plays its role. A disgusting July 2012 piece published by The Blaze illustrates my point. The forum quotes reactionary radio talk show host and frequent enemy of women, Rush Limbaugh, as saying: “I can do one better than that. When women got the right to vote’s when it all went downhill…Because that’s when votes started being cast with emotion and maternal instincts that government ought to reflect.” It is at this point you would respect any responsible, modern news outlet to repudiate these comments in an unqualified way. And you’d be wrong.

Uttered on the heels of Limbaugh’s now-infamous tirade against Sandra Fluke, and the resulting loss of sponsorship that accompanied it, The Blaze actually applauds the shock jock for his resilience and frames his continued hate speech as humorous liberal chum. Writer Mytheos Holt observes, “In fact, so great has Limbaugh’s recovery been that he is now openly taunting his former critics on his show by making obviously joking, but still highly controversial statements about gender politics, with the express intent of seeing which liberal critics will take the bait.”

What the hell is funny about blaming today’s deadlocked, hyperpartisan dialogue on hard-earned female suffrage?

Although corporate media can no longer be counted upon to keep the GOP honest, Rachel Maddow and others of her breed aside, things have gotten so bad that Sunday morning stalwarts like NBC’s Meet the Press feel compelled to interject questions of gender into a focused August 25 discussion of the 1963 march. Toward the end of the show’s roundtable segment, host David Gregory makes an astute observation to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin: “I don’t have to tell you, you look at that chasm among women, it’s also horrible 50 years later. And the feeling that there’s not as much opportunity to move out of that state of affairs.”

I do not mean to diminish the remembrance of the March on Washington as an important tool in taking the current temperature of race relations. As the Trayvon Martin case and the ongoing debate over New York City’s “Stop and Frisk” policy attest, there is much road left to travel before full racial equality is reached. But we must not become complacent toward a powerful and dogged section of conservative leaders that seems unable to accept women as full partners in society, government and the home.

I still remember a little girl in the 1980s, the denizen of a major metropolitan area, relegated to playing outfield on her otherwise all-male t-ball team, despite being one of its most capable members. The sneering, arrogant coach told this girl that she would best serve the team by “staying out of the way.” That young lady had a dream too. She was certain by the time she reached 35 years of age in 2013, the sort of blatant sexism that society tacitly accepted would be a relic of the past, just like Jim Crow laws.

We cannot and must not stay out of the way.

Federal Judge Finally Orders Changes to NYC’s Racially Biased Stop-and-Frisk Policy (August 13, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

stop-frisk

It’s been a tough summer to be a minority entangled in the dispiriting web of the criminal justice system. Florida’s NRA advocated, vigilante-promoting Stand Your Ground law degenerated into inevitable ugliness with the 2012 shooting death of 17 year-old, unarmed teen Trayvon Martin. In the trial that followed, a jury of women upheld shooter George Zimmerman’s contention that he was not a racist, overreaching cop wannabe, just a regular neighborhood watchman protecting his property.  Unfortunately, despite the uproar, pain and public demonstrations which followed the verdict, the jury’s decision was well-founded according to strict application of the horrendous law. Zimmerman need only have felt the appearance of imminent danger to warrant a discharge of his weapon.

The badly needed public discourse that accompanied the case forced American citizens of all stripes to ask themselves and their neighbors the tough questions: Just how far has race equality actually advanced in the post-Civil Rights era? Is our justice system really as blind as our stated ideals desire? Where is the middle ground located between protection of public safety and respect for individual freedom and liberty?

In the local and national conversations which ensued, New York City’s controversial Stop-and-Frisk policy figured prominently. The public data warehouse, Wikipedia, defines the program as “a practice of the New York City Police Department by which a police officer who reasonably suspects a person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a felony or a penal law misdemeanor, stops and questions that person, and, if the officer reasonably suspects he or she is in danger of physical injury, frisks the person stopped for weapons.”

The rightfully suspicious regarded this expansion of street level police authority as rife with racial profiling possibilities. New York City’s outgoing Mayor Michael Bloomberg has found his seat of defense perpetually hot as he weathered public and private demonstrations against the law. Arguing that the policy has reduced crime and saved lives, the Mayor has repeatedly refused calls to abolish or at least amend the statute. The Supreme Court of the United States previously ruled that such practices were constitutional under the vaguely worded, “certain conditions.”

Opponents of the law have long argued that Stop-and-Frisk searches have been unevenly directed at young minority men, particularly African Americans. And this week, that constituency found a powerful ally in the form of federal judge Shira A. Scheindlin. In a decision rendered Monday morning, the judge had strong words of rebuke for Bloomberg and the NYPD. According to a story published in the New York Times, the judge “found that the city ‘adopted a policy of indirect racial profiling by targeting racially defined groups for stops based on local crime suspect data.’ She rejected the city’s arguments that more stops happened in minority neighborhoods solely because those happened to have high-crime rates.” Writer Joseph Goldstein further reports, “To fix the constitutional violations, the judge designated an outside lawyer, Peter L. Zimroth, to monitor the Police Department’s compliance with the Constitution.”

Mr. Zimroth has yeoman’s work ahead in the attempt to fix a law that has displayed “a widespread disregard for the [protections of the] Fourth Amendment,” but the rewards will be well worth the effort. Let this week’s ruling serve as a warning to other municipal locations across the nation who may have been inspired by the Big Apple’s example. Public safety concerns do not equate to free rein to harass “the other.”

Obama Rattles Republicans by Slyly Tying the Housing Recovery to Immigration Reform (August 7, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

obama-gun-event

President Obama has adopted a sly but compelling approach in trying to shake the anti-everything Republican Congressional caucus during its August vacation. It’s no secret that the POTUS considers the inability to pass comprehensive immigration reform to be the biggest failure of his first term. In remarks made during a Univision Spanish language forum in September of 2012, the President was not remiss in sharing blame with the unprecedentedly derelict legislative arm of government which has done its best to oppose the administration’s agenda at every turn. He told Univision, “What I confess I did not expect, and so I’m happy to take responsibility for being naive here, is that Republicans who had previously supported comprehensive immigration reform, my opponent in 2008 who had been a champion of it and who attended these meetings, suddenly would walk away…That’s what I did not anticipate.”

In another era, calling out glaring hypocrisy on the part of one of the nation’s two dominant political parties might have been enough to generate a pivot. However a combination of preoccupied voters still concerned with Great Recession survival, lazy, partisan media outlets and the emboldened cynicism of the GOP have conspired to allow Republican leadership to brand their xenophobia as responsible civic stewardship. “We can’t reward those who break the rules!” they shout. “We must protect American jobs!” These types of justifications are uttered without a hint of irony as the GOP continues to wage war on the middle class on behalf of corporate interests – an arena where rule enforcement and the interests of the American worker suddenly lose their luster.

A signature feature of the President’s second term has been renewed focus and advocacy on the issue of large scale immigration reform. Recognizing that the ideals of the American Dream are imperiled by a system so imbalanced, so painful and punitive as to appear designed for lawbreaking and misery, Obama has returned to a first term issue with gusto. And for a time this past spring, the drive to sign changes into law appeared to have serious momentum. Then, predictably, the Republicans fell into fractious disarray, with Tea Party zealots like Senator Rand Paul and his ilk standing firm against common sense, even as old guard voices like former Vice President Dan Quayle and Karl Rove declared reform “a moral obligation.” This can’t be said enough. When Karl Rove becomes a voice of moderation and reason, your team has clearly gone off the rails.

There are days when I marvel at the President’s ability to get up, get dressed and head to the Oval Office, knowing full well that he’ll be confronting disingenuous, destructive, exhaustive bull crap every waking minute. The man is nothing if not tenacious. He’s also quite dexterous. I must commend him for a subtle new tactic of tying positive bits of economic news to the critical importance of immigration reform. Not only does this provide ample opportunity to keep the issue in the headlines given the recent, if tempered, spate of positive numbers, but it has the added benefit of framing the legislation accurately. Because the continuation of regressive, socioethnically biased policy with regard to our borders has been disowned by the business community and those concerned with justice, alike. How often does that happen?

USA Today published a story this week that ostensibly detailed the President’s plan to roll back Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s share of the mortgage market. However toward the end of the piece, the reporter writes “[Obama] noted a recent study by the pro-immigration group Americas Society/Council of the Americas that shows immigrants have added $ 3.7 trillion in housing wealth. ‘It’s pretty simple: When more people buy homes, and play by the rules, home values go up for everybody,’ Obama said.”

We know how much the climate change denying faction of the GOP, which tends to represent the same crazies that oppose immigration reform, revile facts. But an embrace of reality and practical good sense have served to be the POTUS’ most effective weapons in garnering the support of the American people, and occasionally, shaming Republicans into doing the right thing. Keep it up Mr. President.

Too Big to Wail: Shameless AIG Sues Government Over Bailout (July 30, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

aig-sign

I keep telling myself that there’s nothing left that Wall Street can do to surprise me. I know there are good guys inside the system (full disclosure: I am a Marketing Manager by day at one of the largest insurance brokerages in the world), and so my contempt is for the financial groupthink that drove the nation’s economy into a ditch in recent years, the disengaged fiscal roulette in which these corporations engaged, as if there were no real lives, homes and jobs at stake. Then of course, it continues to grate that when the misbehavior of some of our largest financial institutions brought their solvency to the brink, help in the form of taxpayer bailouts was the ready solution. While we collectively and resignedly understood that to do otherwise would mean a decisive and profound trickle down that would bring citizens and residents to the fetal position (when we were already on our knees), that really didn’t make the necessity feel any better.

In the years that followed the late 2008 housing bubble burst and stock market crash, the situation has only marginally improved for American families. While the Bureau of Labor Statistics would have us believe that the unemployment rate stands at just below eight percent, a figure lower than the summer following Republican patron saint Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, anecdotal evidence all around us disproves the numbers. Don Diamond, a contributor at Forbes, puts the real unemployed/underemployed figure at 14.3 percent. He writes, “But the ‘official’ unemployment rate doesn’t count men and women like G. — discouraged workers who have settled for part-time jobs or have given up looking altogether. Tracking those individuals, under what’s called the ‘U-6′ rate, gives a very different measure of the nation’s unemployment rate.”

Jobs have disappeared, millions of homes have been lost while those who managed to stay in them saw equity drop or abscond altogether, once-healthy 401ks bled money and newly minted college graduates discovered no place for them outside their parents’ spare bedrooms. While many of us on the left and in the center wonder why the Federal government failed to prioritize a bailout for the American people, we have soldiered on with far less complaining than we might have.

This resilience of the spirit is appallingly lacking in some of the corporate entities that, once broken, are now doing fine, thank you very much – courtesy of taxpayer generosity. I thought I’d mistakenly stumbled across The Onion’s website by accident this week when I encountered the following headline: Judge OK’s questioning Bernanke in suit over AIG bailout. From the Boston Globe, via the Associated Press, the first question this story brought to mind was: “Why on Earth would AIG be suing the government? We saved their asses!”

But it appears the company does in fact have the unmitigated gall to whine about the very loose strings that came attached to the money. Marcy Gordon reports, “Hank Greenberg, the former AIG chief executive, has sued the government over the $182 billion bailout, which AIG has since repaid. Greenberg claims the terms of the bailout were too onerous and is seeking at least $25 billion… [the suit] accuses the government of taking valuable assets from AIG’s shareholders without their consent or fair compensation, in exchange for the government’s 80 percent stake in the company. The government’s actions violated parts of the Fifth Amendment, the lawsuit contends.”

Yeah. Really. As if to belabor the irony, Gordon characterizes the government’s response as follows: “the allegations are groundless. AIG’s only alternative to not receiving federal aid was bankruptcy, which would have left shareholders with worthless stock, the New York Fed has said.”

It must be mentioned that this meritless lawsuit will waste the valuable time of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who will be deposed in service of this sideshow. Also, if I stop and think about the additional wasted resources attached to this complaint – court costs, legal fees, intern salaries, etc. – I succumb to unqualified rage.

Where do these people get off? The modern GOP loves to talk about the 47 percent and it’s fondness for the “nanny state,” the food stamps, Medicaid and other social safety mechanisms that barely keep families afloat as they try to struggle back to personal solvency. But what is this brazen biting of the hand from AIG if not the entitled display of the unforgivably coddled? The logic, like that of a spoiled trust fund baby goes like this: I was profligate and you saved me. Thanks but, I didn’t ask you to and even though I gratefully accepted the help, I think I should get a rebate on the toxic assets you took and converted into viable capital. So would you be a dove?

I am not a corporate attorney or financial expert, but I can’t fathom how this suit was even granted a judge’s hearing, let alone allowed to disrupt the day to day business of the Fed Chair who – apparently it must be said – is still looking for monetary solutions that will get the American people back to work.

Newsflash for AIG: when you loan money, you pay it back with interest. I am surprised I have to say this to an organization that you know, specializes in money management and insurance. You signed on the dotted line five years ago to save your shareholders the shame and expense of bankruptcy. It worked out well for them and you. How dare you ask for anything more?