Thursday, February 27th, 2014
ELIZABETH HARRINGTON, - The Washington Free Beacon
Stephan: American democracy, such as it is, is deteriorating before our eyes. The forms may remain, but the substance is fundamentally changed. Jonathan Turley, Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, discusses one aspect -- one of many -- of what is happening.
Members of Congress and constitutional law experts testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, warning that the legislative branch is in danger of ceding its power in the face of an ‘imperial presidency.”
The hearing, ‘Enforcing the President’s Constitutional Duty to Faithfully Execute the Laws,” focused on the multiple areas President Barack Obama has bypassed Congress, ranging from healthcare and immigration to marriage and welfare rules.
Jonathan Turley, Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, testified that the expansion of executive power is happening so fast that America is at a ‘constitutional tipping point.”
‘My view [is] that the president, has in fact, exceeded his authority in a way that is creating a destabilizing influence in a three branch system,” he said. ‘I want to emphasize, of course, this problem didn’t begin with President Obama, I was critical of his predecessor President Bush as well, but the rate at which executive power has been concentrated in our system is accelerating. And frankly, I am very alarmed by the implications of that aggregation of power.”
‘What also alarms me, however, is that the two other branches appear not just simply passive, but inert in the face of this concentration of authority,” […]
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Thursday, February 27th, 2014
CJ WERLEMAN, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: While I think the LGBT consideration is one impulse for these Theocratic Right efforts the deeper and more important aspect in my view is that this is a cloak under which hides an attempt to create a wedge that would allow all manner of hate to be clothed in religion. What the Right has realized is that in the U.S. if you can dress something in clerical garb you can legalize almost anything.
As I am writing this it has just been announced that Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has vetoed the awful legislation that passed both houses of the state's legislature. Maybe we have dodged a bullet.
With LGBT rights activists winning court victories in state after state, the Christian Right has opened a new battlefield in the nation’s cultural war, and they’re leaving nothing behind in their effort to enact Jim Crow-era laws against gay Americans.
Taking inspiration from the Hobby Lobby case – a case that threatens to allow a corporation to invoke religion to exempt itself from a law (contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act) it doesn’t like – Republican lawmakers have pushed a slew of bills under the guise of ‘religious freedom.” This means businesses or individuals would be granted not only the right to deny services or employment to LGBT American, but also immunity against prosecution for discrimination.
Last week, Republicans in Kansas’ lower house passed a bill that would have effectively allowed Christian business owners or employees the right to deny service to same-sex couples. Think segregated restaurants in the Deep South prior to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and you’re drawing a mental picture of what the Christian Right hoped to achieve in Kansas. The language of the bill would have allowed restaurants, for instance, to deny service to ‘any marriage, domestic partnership,” or ‘civil union” that ‘would be contrary to […]
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Thursday, February 27th, 2014
Stephan: Water is destiny -- in so many ways most of us never really consider. Here is the latest data point. Think of this as social karma in action.
Click through to see the illustrations which make the points in the article clearer.
About 3 billion people live within 100 miles (160km) of the sea, a number that could double in the next decade as humans flock to coastal cities like gulls. The oceans produce $3 trillion of goods and services each year and untold value for the Earth’s ecology. Life could not exist without these vast water reserves-and, if anything, they are becoming even more important to humans than before.
Mining is about to begin under the seabed in the high seas-the regions outside the exclusive economic zones administered by coastal and island nations, which stretch 200 nautical miles (370km) offshore. Nineteen exploratory licences have been issued. New summer shipping lanes are opening across the Arctic Ocean. The genetic resources of marine life promise a pharmaceutical bonanza: the number of patents has been rising at 12% a year. One study found that genetic material from the seas is a hundred times more likely to have anti-cancer properties than that from terrestrial life.
But these developments are minor compared with vaster forces reshaping the Earth, both on land and at sea. It has long been clear that people are damaging the oceans-witness the melting of the Arctic ice in summer, the spread of oxygen-starved dead […]
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Thursday, February 27th, 2014
MATT STROUD, - Politico Magazine
Stephan: Here is the latest in the For-profit American Gulag Trend. This is a truly shameful development.
n October, when California Governor Jerry Brown signed a new contract with Corrections Corporation of America, a Nashville-based private prison behemoth, onlookers might’ve wondered if he’d been following the news.
The same could be asked of Wall Street in general. Over the last five years, CCA’s stock price has increased by more than 200 percent and earlier this month Jim Cramer’s investment website The Street praised the company’s ‘strengths” on Wall Street, enthusiastically rating its stock a ‘buy.”
As inmate populations have soared over the last 30 years, private prisons have emerged as an appealing solution to cash-starved states. Privately run prisons are cheaper and can be set up much faster than those run by the government. Nearly a tenth of all U.S. prisoners are housed in private prisons, as are almost two-thirds of immigrants in detention centers-and the companies that run them have cashed in. CCA, the oldest and largest modern private prison company, took over its first facility in 1983. Now it’s a Wall Street darling with a market cap of nearly $3.8 billion. Similarly, GEO Group, the second largest private-prison operator, last week reported $1.52 billion in revenue for 2013, its most ever and more than a hundredfold increase […]
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Thursday, February 27th, 2014
GREGORY CLARK, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis - The New York Times
Stephan: Facts are so inconvenient when confronted by myth.
Inequality of income and wealth has risen in America since the 1970s, yet a large-scale research study recently found that social mobility hadn’t changed much during that time. How can that be?
The study, by researchers at Harvard and Berkeley, tells only part of the story. It may be true that mobility hasn’t slowed – but, more to the point, mobility has always been slow.
When you look across centuries, and at social status broadly measured – not just income and wealth, but also occupation, education and longevity – social mobility is much slower than many of us believe, or want to believe. This is true in Sweden, a social welfare state; England, where industrial capitalism was born; the United States, one of the most heterogeneous societies in history; and India, a fairly new democracy hobbled by the legacy of caste. Capitalism has not led to pervasive, rapid mobility. Nor have democratization, mass public education, the decline of nepotism, redistributive taxation, the emancipation of women, or even, as in China, socialist revolution.
Javier Jaén
To a striking extent, your overall life chances can be predicted not just from your parents’ status but also from your great-great-great-grandparents’. The recent study suggests that 10 percent […]
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