Media

It's finally over.

Today marks the formal end of the nine-year U.S. military intervention in Iraq, although of course we are far from fully disentangled there with two military bases remaining on Iraq soil and 4,000 troops.

Recommended Reading: Bloomberg Businessweek's "How Inequality Hurts the Economy" by David J. Lynch. People have been making this argument for a while now -- inequality hurts growth because channeling wealth to the few simultaneously concentrates risk -- but Lynch's piece overwhelms because it lays out the full range of harms done to the economy by inequality.  

Chalk one up for Occupy Wall Street.

Last Thursday, the New York State legislature voted to raise taxes on high-earners after Governor Andrew Cuomo reversed his longstanding opposition to such a move. Cuomo cited a large budget gap in explaining his about-face, but that gap is hardly new. What is: taxing the top 1 percent is far easier now than it was a few months ago.

In recent years, the debate about immigration in the U.S. has focused largely on how best to expel the undocumented: more border security, bigger fences, and even moats have been proposed.

It’s refreshing, then, to hear new ideas that acknowledge the humanity of those who immigrate to the U.S. Specifically, some have suggested that the amount of time an unauthorized individual has spent in the U.S. should be considered in evaluating their eligibility for obtaining citizenship.

One exciting thing about politics today, for all the dysfunction, is that we are living in an era of big and sweeping visions. The conservative plan for America -- say, as encapsulated in Paul Ryan's Roadmap for America -- would be devastating for many ordinary people, but you can't accuse the right of small thinking.

"It is something out of the Stalinist Era," says Lindsey Graham. Perhaps the esteemed senator from South Carolina is angered by the CIA drone attacks? Or the Justice Department's kneecapping of FOIA, whereby the Agency seeks license to "lie, and claim records do not exist, when they do"?

Newt Gingrich recently railed against increased food security for the poorest and unluckiest in our society. On Nov 30, he insulted Obama by calling him the “best food stamp president in history.”

As the Durban climate talks come to an end, Canada announced on Monday that it would be withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol. Wait, what? Canada? This type of move is somewhat expected from the U.S., assuming we had ratified Kyoto, but not from our progressive neighbor to the North.

What happened?

Despite what critics say, the DoE’s guaranteed loan program is a successful program and government investment to further develop clean energy is the right thing to do.