Hold Fast

Originally posted at AMERICAblog John has been posting regularly on #OccupyWallStreet, particularly highlighting the disgusting and brutal NYPD attacks on non-violent protestors. I also highly recommend Sarah Jaffe’s rich and detailed post at Alternet, which does a great job contextualizing why people have been occupying Wall Street for more than 11 days at this point. [...]

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Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism responds to Melissa Harris-Perry’s post on The Nation that racism is driving the abandonment of Barack Obama by white liberals. Harris-Perry has been one of the more prominent reflexive defenders of President Obama, but her charge of racism is serious and merits evaluation. Smith does that, as well as connecting [...]

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Professor Elizabeth Warren: I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.”—No! There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest [...]

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Originally posted at AMERICAblog A rare moment of political integrity emerges from the Super Congress process, thanks to Senator John Kerry: “I’m not meeting with a lot of lobbyists; I’m meeting with people I choose to meet with, who can inform me, assist in the process of crunching numbers and dealing with consequences, and so [...]

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In Salon, Ed Kilgore responds to Matt Stoller’s piece on Obama’s destruction of the Democratic Party. Kilgore basically says that a primary of Obama isn’t likely because Obama still has strong support among base voters, though he looks at personal approval ratings, not the 32% of Democrats who want a primary. Kilgore also dismisses Stoller’s [...]

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Originally posted at AMERICAblog There is an emerging consensus amongst the Democrats who will serve on the deficit commission (aka Catfood Commission 2, Electric Class Warfare) that the mandate of $1.5 trillion in deficit cuts is insufficient. Democrats on the new joint deficit Super Committee will seek more than the $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction [...]

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Matt Stoller in Salon: Obama has ruined the Democratic Party. … So why isn’t there a legitimate primary challenger to Obama to make this case? Forty years ago, primaries were instituted in the Democratic Party as a response to party insiders having too much influence over nominations. These reforms were implemented before the prevalence of [...]

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Matt Stoller has been consistently writing thoughtful analysis about the Obama administration and what’s happening in American political life, but this piece at Naked Capitalism is undoubtedly one of his sharpest pieces of writing, pulling together a number of different threads of analysis around what we’re seeing out of New York’s Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman. [...]

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Originally posted at AMERICAblog. The relationships between progressive House Democrats and the administration seems somewhat strained. Jim McGovern (MA-3): “We need to get the focus back on jobs,” said McGovern. “Here we are at the end of August, and Congress hasn’t done anything about jobs.”McGovern voted “no” on the debt ceiling compromise, calling is “a [...]

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What world does Ezra Klein live in? To govern responsibly, Democrats cannot simply raise taxes on the rich and call it a day. That’s a world in which Republicans continuously force crises, refuse taxes, and extract deeper and deeper cuts. Already, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has called the GOP’s debt-ceiling brinksmanship “a new template” and [...]

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