The Hutaree militia and the rising risk of far-right violence

by Eugene Robinson

It is dishonest for right-wing commentators to insist on an equivalence that does not exist. The danger of political violence in this country comes overwhelmingly from one direction — the right, not the left. The vitriolic, anti-government hate speech that is spewed on talk radio every day — and, quite regularly, at Tea Party rallies — is calibrated not to inform but to incite. (Read Full Article)

Why We Need An Independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency Now

With financial regulatory reform pending, Congress has the opportunity to rebuild the structures that will prevent another crisis and ensure broad-based economic growth.
March 1, 2010
By Tamara Draut & Heather C. McGhee

The time has come for the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. For thirty years, Washington has been captive to a governing philosophy that eschewed regulation in almost any form, arguing that the hand of government was best kept behind its back. But the era of deregulated finance has shown that without public structures to ensure accountability and fairness, the system can not sustain itself. The result of this failed experiment in deregulation has been a crisis costing Americans $11 trillion in family wealth, $14 trillion in taxpayer bailouts and over 8 million jobs.

What a Consumer Financial Protection Agency Will-and Won’t-Do

Q: How would a new “independent” agency work?
Q: Doesn’t the CFPA add to the regulatory burden facing banks?
Q: Doesn’t the CFPA create a new bureaucracy in an already crowded financial oversight field?
Q: Shouldn’t the CFPA’s rules preempt state consumer protection laws?
Q: Won’t the CFPA stifle innovation and consumer choice?
Q: Shouldn’t the CFPA be an office within a bank regulator or a council of existing regulators?

Read the full article for the answers to these common criticisms against creating a consumer financial protection agency.

Haiti: A Creditor, Not a Debtor

By Naomi Klein, The Nation, February 11, 2010

If we are to believe the G-7 finance ministers, Haiti is on its way to getting something it has deserved for a very long time: full “forgiveness” of its foreign debt. In Port-au-Prince, Haitian economist Camille Chalmers has been watching these developments with cautious optimism. Debt cancellation is a good start, he told Al Jazeera English, but “It’s time to go much further. We have to talk about reparations and restitution for the devastating consequences of debt.” In this telling, the whole idea that Haiti is a debtor needs to be abandoned. Haiti, he argues, is a creditor—and it is we, in the West, who are deeply in arrears.
Our debt to Haiti stems from four main sources: slavery, the US occupation, dictatorship and climate change. These claims are not fantastical, nor are they merely rhetorical. They rest on multiple violations of legal norms and agreements. Here, far too briefly, are highlights of the Haiti case.

§?The Slavery Debt. When Haitians won their independence from France in 1804, they would have had every right to claim reparations from the powers that had profited from three centuries of stolen labor. France, however, was convinced that it was Haitians who had stolen the property of slave owners by refusing to work for free. So in 1825, with a flotilla of war ships stationed off the Haitian coast threatening to re-enslave the former colony, King Charles X came to collect: 90 million gold francs–ten times Haiti’s annual revenue at the time. With no way to refuse, and no way to pay, the young nation was shackled to a debt that would take 122 years to pay off.

In 2003, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, facing a crippling economic embargo, announced that Haiti would sue the French government over that long-ago heist. “Our argument,” Aristide’s former lawyer Ira Kurzban told me, “was that the contract was an invalid agreement because it was based on the threat of re-enslavement at a time when the international community regarded slavery as an evil.” The French government was sufficiently concerned that it sent a mediator to Port-au-Prince to keep the case out of court. In the end, however, its problem was eliminated: while trial preparations were under way, Aristide was toppled from power. The lawsuit disappeared, but for many Haitians the reparations claim lives on.

§?The Dictatorship Debt. From 1957 to 1986, Haiti was ruled by the defiantly kleptocratic Duvalier regime. Unlike the French debt, the case against the Duvaliers made it into several courts, which traced Haitian funds to an elaborate network of Swiss bank accounts and lavish properties. In 1988 Kurzban won a landmark suit against Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier when a US District Court in Miami found that the deposed ruler had “misappropriated more than $504,000,000 from public monies.”

Haitians, of course, are still waiting for their payback–but that was only the beginning of their losses. For more than two decades, the country’s creditors insisted that Haitians honor the huge debts incurred by the Duvaliers, estimated at $844 million, much of it owed to institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. In debt service alone, Haitians have paid out tens of millions every year.

Was it legal for foreign lenders to collect on the Duvalier debts when so much of it was never spent in Haiti? Very likely not. As Cephas Lumina, the United Nations Independent Expert on foreign debt, put it to me, “the case of Haiti is one of the best examples of odious debt in the world. On that basis alone the debt should be unconditionally canceled.” But even if Haiti does see full debt cancellation (a big if), that does not extinguish its right to be compensated for illegal debts already collected.

§?The Climate Debt. Championed by several developing countries at the climate summit in Copenhagen, the case for climate debt is straightforward. Wealthy countries that have so spectacularly failed to address the climate crisis they caused owe a debt to the developing countries that have done little to cause the crisis but are disproportionately facing its effects. In short: the polluter pays. Haiti has a particularly compelling claim. Its contribution to climate change has been negligible; Haiti’s per capita CO2 emissions are just 1 percent of US emissions. Yet Haiti is among the hardest hit countries—according to one index, only Somalia is more vulnerable to climate change.

Haiti’s vulnerability to climate change is not only—or even mostly—because of geography. Yes, it faces increasingly heavy storms. But it is Haiti’s weak infrastructure that turns challenges into disasters and disasters into full-fledged catastrophes. The earthquake, though not linked to climate change, is a prime example. And this is where all those illegal debt payments may yet extract their most devastating cost. Each payment to a foreign creditor was money not spent on a road, a school, an electrical line. And that same illegitimate debt empowered the IMF and World Bank to attach onerous conditions to each new loan, requiring Haiti to deregulate its economy and slash its public sector still further. Failure to comply was met with a punishing aid embargo from 2001 to ‘04, the death knell to Haiti’s public sphere.

This history needs to be confronted now, because it threatens to repeat itself. Haiti’s creditors are already using the desperate need for earthquake aid to push for a fivefold increase in garment-sector production, some of the most exploitative jobs in the country. Haitians have no status in these talks, because they are regarded as passive recipients of aid, not full and dignified participants in a process of redress and restitution.

A reckoning with the debts the world owes to Haiti would radically change this poisonous dynamic. This is where the real road to repair begins: by recognizing the right of Haitians to reparations.

Tough Lessons for Obama’s First Year

The first is that the “enthusiasm gap” matters, and it matters a lot. There is no way that a Democratic candidate for the Senate from Massachusetts, running to fill the seat that the late Ted Kennedy held for decades, should have anything but a cakewalk to victory. It’s true that Martha Coakley ran a mediocre campaign and that Republican Scott Brown ran a very good one, but still, this is Massachusetts we’re talking about. That Obama would have to fly in two days before the vote and stump for Coakley and the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority was absurd. (READ FULL ARTICLE)

Krugman: Age of Reaganism Should Be Over

The debate over the “public option” in health care has been dismaying in many ways. Perhaps the most depressing aspect for progressives, however, has been the extent to which opponents of greater choice in health care have gained traction — in Congress, if not with the broader public — simply by repeating, over and over again, that the public option would be, horrors, a government program.

Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism — by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.

Call me naïve, but I actually hoped that the failure of Reaganism in practice would kill it. It turns out, however, to be a zombie doctrine: even though it should be dead, it keeps on coming.

Let’s talk for a moment about why the age of Reagan should be over.
(Read Full Article)

Why We Need Health Care Reform

By President Barack Obama

OUR nation is now engaged in a great debate about the future of health care in America. And over the past few weeks, much of the media attention has been focused on the loudest voices. What we haven’t heard are the voices of the millions upon millions of Americans who quietly struggle every day with a system that often works better for the health-insurance companies than it does for them.

These are people like Lori Hitchcock, whom I met in New Hampshire last week. Lori is currently self-employed and trying to start a business, but because she has hepatitis C, she cannot find an insurance company that will cover her. Another woman testified that an insurance company would not cover illnesses related to her internal organs because of an accident she had when she was 5 years old. A man lost his health coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because the insurance company discovered that he had gallstones, which he hadn’t known about when he applied for his policy. Because his treatment was delayed, he died. (Read Full Article)

Fight Back Against Health Care Insurance Lies

While successful at derailing health care reform under Bill Clinton, the health care insurance companies finally have something it hasn’t had in a long time – a fight on its hands. Not only is the White House launching rebuttals against the scare tactics planted by the insurance companies to prevent true reform, but also organizations like Moveon.org are producing television ads to help debunk the myths deliberately planted by the health care lobbyists which are being paid $1.5 million a day to prevent passage of a meaningful health care reform bill.

Joining in the fight is Brave New Films with this mini-documentary Sick for Profit . It highlights the human toll behind the wealth and very lucrative lifestyles of health care CEO’s, exposing the true motives of the push back against health care reform – money and greed.

Finally, this campaign against changing the broken health care system in America has something that the previous one was sorely lacking – an all out assault by the White House and third party groups against misinformation . Maybe we really do have a shot at true change.

Quit Negative Thinking – Three Steps to Stopping Negative Thinking and Self Defeat

by Shannon E. Cook

Many people struggle with negative thoughts that hold them back from achieving their true potential in life. Mindset is hugely important in any endeavor – the direction the energy is flowing makes a huge difference. If your thoughts align with your goals, your goals are much more likely to be achieved. Negative thoughts send energy the opposite direction and impede or halt any progress on your goals and challenges. Here are 3 steps to stopping negative thinking and the corresponding self defeat:

1. Let go of your anger at others. Holding negative energy internally takes up space where positive energy could reside. First, let yourself feel the full experience of the anger. Note how it effects your physically as well as emotionally. Next, allow for the possibility that the person who wronged you did the best he or she could with whatever survival tool he or she has to work with – even if these tools are destructive. Then, visualize releasing this person into the universe, to whatever God has in store for him or her. Feel yourself releasing the responsibilities that come with desiring revenge – it isn’t your job to punish that person anymore. Finally, begin thinking about what you learned and how this experience might benefit you in the future.

2. Stop negative thinking cycles in their tracks. When a persistent negative thought comes into your head, say “cancel” or “stop” out loud and imagine a big red “X” through the thought. You can also slap your hand on a table or change activities to break that thought circuit.

3. Begin to imagine your dreams, goals, and aspirations. Think of them in full sensory detail – the way it looks, smells, sounds, tastes, and feels to achieve this goal in present time. The more you do this, the more likely it is to be attracted into your life.

Are you interested in addressing your life challenges from a holistic standpoint, assessing the physical, emotional, and relationship components?

For a free copy of my ebook, “Natural Methods To Fight Depression”, click here: http://www.stoptoxicrelationships.com/gifts-naturalmethodstofightdepression.html

Shannon Cook is a personal coach and resource guide who has written a number of informative articles and ebooks on the topic of toxic relationships and holistic personal growth, including physical, emotional and relationship health.

Racism: A Dish Served Cold

ABC’s Primetime Live ran a special series where hidden cameras reveal what people would do in various intense situations. The first episode this season did a staged social experiment to see how unsuspecting people would react to witnessing overt and rather graphic racial discrimination.

WATCH |

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.

What was most shocking was not the blatant racism of the few that approve of what they saw but the majority who said or did absolutely nothing. Before I take the high road from the controlled setting of my family room and say I would have done exactly what these two and the other amazing Americans did in standing up against racism, I have to ask myself have I ever been in any situation that demanded that someone speak up but was afraid to. The most productive thing to do is not to allow missed opportunities in the past when we could have done the right thing but failed to take a stand condemn us to a guilty conscience, but to allow this example to call us higher, being resolved to do the right thing from hence forth.