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Katrina vanden Heuvel

Katrina vanden Heuvel

Politics, current affairs and riffs and reflections on the news.


A US soldier in Iraq, March 22, 2003

A US soldier in Iraq, March 22, 2003 (AP Photo/John Moore)

This Monday marks the eleventh anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq—a solemn punctuation mark to the steadily increasing violence that has gripped that country over the past two years. Sectarian violence claimed more than 8,000 Iraqis in 2013 alone, and this year’s toll has already surpassed 2,000. Iraq today is a broken and failing state: the war that many would prefer to believe ended in 2011 continues unabated, with Iraqis continuing to suffer, as much as ever, the fallout from this country’s callous lies and avoidable mistakes. Despite Colin Powell’s sanctimonious “Pottery Barn rule,” John Feffer wrote on his Foreign Policy in Focus blog at TheNation.com last month, the United States has made no effort to “own up to our responsibility for breaking the country.”

To a regrettably unsurprising extent, the issue of The Nation that went to press just as American tanks crossed over the border from Kuwait accurately predicted what would happen in the wake of an invasion. Our lead editorial in that issue began:

The Bush Administration has launched a war against Iraq, a war that is unnecessary, unwise and illegal. By attacking a nation that has not attacked us and that does not pose an immediate threat to international peace and security, the Administration has violated the United Nations Charter and opened a new and shameful chapter in US history. Moreover, by abandoning a UN inspection and disarmament process that was working, it has chosen a path that is an affront not only to America’s most cherished values but to the world community. The UN did not fail; rather, Washington sought a UN imprimatur for a war it had already decided to wage and scorned it when the Administration couldn’t get its way.

Jonathan Schell, in an article in the same issue titled “American Tragedy,” described the wider implication of the Bush administration’s action: an existential threat to the separation of powers, the protection of civil liberties, the commitment to the international and domestic rule of law.

The decision to go to war to overthrow the government of Iraq will bring unreckonable death and suffering to that country, the surrounding region and, possibly, the United States. It also marks a culmination in the rise within the United States of an immense concentration of unaccountable power that poses the greatest threat to the American constitutional system since the Watergate crisis. This transformation, in turn, threatens to push the world into a new era of rivalry, confrontation and war. The location of the new power is of course the presidency (whose Augustan proportions make the “imperial” presidency of the cold war look like a mere practice run). Its sinews are the awesome might of the American military machine, which, since Congress’s serial surrender of the constitutional power to declare war, has passed wholly into the President’s hands. Its main political instrument is the Republican Party. Its financial wherewithal is the corporate money that inundates the political realm. Its strategy at home is restriction of civil liberties, deep secrecy, a makeover in its image of the judiciary, subservience to corporate interests across the board and transfer of personal wealth on a colossal scale from the average person to its wealthy supporters. Its popular support stems from fear engendered by the attacks of September 11—fear that has been manipulated to extend far beyond its proper objects. Its overriding goal, barely concealed behind the banner of the war on terrorism, is the accumulation of ever more power, whose supreme expression is its naked ambition to establish hegemony over the earth.…

The tragedy of America in the post-cold war era is that we have proved unequal to the responsibility that our own power placed upon us. Some of us became intoxicated with it, imagining that we could rule the world. Others of us—the Democratic Party, Congress, the judiciary, the news media—abdicated our obligation to challenge, to check and to oppose, letting the power-hungry have their way. The government of the United States went into opposition against its own founding principles, leaving it to the rest of the world to take up our cause. The French have been better Americans than we have. Because the Constitution, though battered, is still intact, we may still have time and opportunity to recoup. But for now, we will have to pay the price of our weakness. The costs will be heavy, first of all for the people of Iraq but also for others, including ourselves. The international order on which the common welfare, including its ecological and economic welfare, depends has sustained severe damage. The fight for “freedom” abroad is crippling freedom at home. The war to stop proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has provoked that very proliferation in North Korea and Iran. More ground has already been lost in the field of proliferation than can be gained even by the most delirious victory in Baghdad. Former friends of America have been turned into rivals or foes. The United States may be about to win Iraq. It has already lost the world.

In her column, “War: What Is It Good For?The Nation’s Katha Pollitt wrote about the consequences of the US invasion at home and abroad:

Whatever the immediate results—this many dead children versus that much freedom from repression—the fundamental issue has to be the perils of “pre-emptive war” in volatile times. However it works out for the Iraqis, invading their country will be bad for the rest of the world. It will aid terrorist recruitment, it will license other countries—India and Pakistan, for example—to wage pre-emptive wars of their own, it may even consolidate Islamic fundamentalism as the only alternative to American power in the Middle East. Those are the fears not just of the American antiwar movement but of the majority of people around the world, even in the nations whose leaders have joined with ours.

But who cares about the majority of the world’s people? We’ll go to war unilaterally, with our pathetic collection of allies (Britain, OK. But Spain? Italy? Latvia?), while the rest of the world stands by appalled. We’ll boycott the Dixie Chicks, eat our freedom fries and even, as documented in the New York Times, pour Dom Perignon by the gallon down the toilet (“I’ll bet it was just water,” said the manager of my local liquor store. “Nobody would waste great champagne like that!”). People will be called traitors if they wear peace T-shirts, fail to salute the flag or dare to suggest that anyone in the Administration has lower motives than the selfless salvation of humanity. Journalists “embedded,” as the odd phrase goes, in military units will send back an endless stream of heartwarmers that will reinforce the confusion of “support the troops” with “support the war.” If, in the end, the Iraqis turn out to hate and resent the nation that bombed them into freedom, we’ll shake our heads in angry bewilderment: After all we did for you, this is the thanks we get!

The issue raised by the invasion of Iraq is American imperialism. That won’t go away, no matter how this particular adventure turns out. See you at the demonstration.


Finally, the issue carried a report from “Inside Baghdad” by Jeremy Scahill, whom The Nation nurtured as a journalist, publishing his dispatches from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and ensuring that they became the bestselling books, Blackwater and Dirty Wars. On the eve of the Iraq War, Scahill wrote of the hopes and fears of the Iraqi people, as one horrific chapter of their nation’s history was about to end and another to begin:

Perhaps it’s twenty years of unending war and sanctions; perhaps it’s the tremendous repression; likely, it’s everything together, but Iraqis want it all to end. They are exhausted and, most of them, miserable. In the early stages of the imposition of the US-led sanctions against Iraq, US officials made clear that Iraqis would be made to suffer until Saddam Hussein was no longer in power. The last decade has represented one of the most brutal campaigns of targeting innocent civilians to achieve Washington’s policy aims. The constant bombing, the massive shortages of medicine, the rapid decimation of a once-proud middle class, the tens of thousands of innocent children withering away in filthy hospital beds, the unclean drinking water, the total dependence on the government for food, have all made ordinary Iraqis pay an incredible price for a government over which they have no control.…

There is no question that hatred of the US government is strong in Iraq, regardless of what people think of Saddam. And few accept that America has any right to overthrow the Iraqi government. Iraqis have seen what occupation looks like, both through British colonization of Iraq and through the lens of the Palestinians. “We don’t want Saddam, but that doesn’t mean we want America, either,” said Mazen, an unemployed engineer. He said his father’s name is Jihad. The name, Mazen said, was given because his grandfather fought against the British colonialists in the 1920s. “It’s in my family blood. We will not accept a foreign invader or occupier, even if it damns us to more years under an Iraqi dictator. At least he is one of us…

But even those people who would welcome a US victory over Saddam are concerned about what might come after. People across the map say they fear a civil war that would pit the surviving Baathists and loyalist forces of the regime against masses of angry civilians and disaffected army deserters. Some Christians say they also fear that Islamic fundamentalists will attack them. Over the past twelve years, Iraq has seen a rapid desecularization of its society, and Islamic groups hope to replace the Baathist government with an Islamic state. “You know why we Christians want Saddam to stay in power?” asks a restaurant owner in Baghdad. “Because he is protecting us from radical Muslims. He always has done this, and if he goes, we are afraid what will happen to us.”

Scahill also interviewed Iraqis who looked forward to the Hussein regime’s downfall, even at the price of a US invasion. But that didn’t change the fact that even if that happened quickly and relatively smoothly, the violence would be by no means at an end:

Even if some Iraqis celebrate in the streets if Saddam’s government is brought down, it will reflect no success of US policy. It will simply represent a violent end to a horrifying chapter in the vast, unfinished book of Iraq. It will be the fruits of a merciless economic and military war waged against the innocent for twelve years. Regardless of what happens, it is the ordinary Iraqis—the doctors, the engineers turned taxi drivers, the shoeshine boys, the mothers and fathers—who should be praised for having found the will to live and the will to survive a heartless war waged against them by a superpower and a tyrant.

Though both are now gone, their entwined legacies remain disastrously oppressive to the Iraqi people.

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The ‘Next Citizens United’ May Fuel a Popular Uprising

Second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling

Demonstrators marking the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’sCitizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, January 20, 2012. (Reuters/Shannon Stapleton)


Pity poor Shaun McCutcheon.

McCutcheon is the Alabama businessman suing the Federal Election Commission for abridging his First Amendment right to free speech—that is, if we define free speech as McCutcheon’s right to donate upward of $123,200 in a single election cycle. He claims eliminating federal limits on an individual’s aggregate campaign contributions is “about practicing democracy and being free.” To underscore his love of freedom, McCutcheon wrote checks to 15 Republican candidates in the symbolic sum of $1,776.


The Supreme Court is expected to hand down its decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission any day now. Given the Roberts court’s track record, the biggest campaign-finance decision since Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is likely to blow another gigantic hole in the fabric of our democracy.

Such a ruling will fuel popular outrage and increase pressure for fundamental reforms such as disclosure and public financing. Already, Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) and Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) have introduced a constitutional amendment allowing campaign spending limits. This would finally supercede the Supreme Court’s infamous 1976 ruling in Buckley v. Valeo, which equated money with speechand effectively turned our elections into auctions.



Representative Keith Ellison












Read Next: John Nichols interviews Bernie Sanders.

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This Week in ‘Nation’ History: The European Right—From (Jean-Marie) Le Pen to (Marine) Le Pen—and the Rise of the French Far Right

Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine Le Pen

Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine Le Pen (Reuters/Daniel Joubert)

Next week’s issue of The Nation will feature a report by Stanford Professor Cécile Alduy about the alarming rise of Marine Le Pen and the French far right. In recent years, Le Pen has skillfully, if disingenuously, attempted to scrub her National Front party of the most odious manifestations of the anti-Semitism, racism and outright xenophobia in which her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, specialized during his forty-year leadership of the party. At the same time, Alduy writes, the French mainstream—mistakenly scapegoating immigrants for the country’s economic malaise—has moved further to the right. Whatever the results of local elections slated for later this month and European Parliament elections in May, there is a serious risk that the toxic ideology of the National Front will become further enshrined and legitimized as a driving force in the public conversation—not only in France, but across Europe as a whole.

Although Le Pen “has managed to put a modern gloss on an old political brand,” Alduy writes, the underlying philosophy of the National Front remains almost exactly the same as it was under Jean-Marie Le Pen. It is perhaps useful, then, to re-examine the behavior of the wolf before it donned sheep’s clothing—and for such a mission there is no better guide than Daniel Singer, The Nation’s longtime European correspondent before his death in 2000. His numerous dispatches on Le Pen père—“the man whose name is synonymous with the recent revival of overt racism in French politics and society,” Singer wrote in 1985—show how mutable and dangerous remains the threat emanating from what Singer, in a recurring assortment of related metaphors, called France’s plague, poison and disease.

In “The Resistible Rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen” (September 7, 1985), Singer wrote of Le Pen:

Smiling, smartly dressed, he now seems—particularly on television, where he is on his best behavior—a frank and reasonable fellow saying aloud “what everybody really believes,” telling people “what they already know,” a man who merely echoes the basic precept of that great American Ronald Reagan: namely, that communism is the root of all evil. A red-faced, rather fat man who warns the “silent majority” against muggers, drug addicts, gays and crypto-pinkos, Le Pen might be described as a sort of French Spiro Agnew preaching law and order, except that he is not of Greek or any other foreign extraction. That is an important difference, because the man and the movement he leads, the National Front, trumpet the slogan “Frenchmen First” and spread the fairy tale that everything would be fine in the streets and hospitals, in the schools and even the factories were it not for the foreign hordes invading France, particularly those crossing the Mediterranean. France would be just marvelous without Marxists, Arabs and other aliens.…

The entry of avowed racists into the French Parliament is not in itself the worst prospect. As the old saying goes, you don’t bring the temperature down by breaking the thermometer…. More worrisome is the underlying ideological shift to the right, the radical metamorphosis of the substance and form of political debate, of which this plague is only a symptom.

Three years later, after the National Front had secured a new level of legitimacy when Le Pen won more than 14 percent of the vote in the 1988 presidential election, Singer wrote “In the Heart of Le Pen Country,” about a visit to Marseille:

Serious trouble does not begin when the men with jackboots or with cloven hoofs opt for fascism. It begins when the tinker and tailor, your neighbor and your cousin, are driven sufficiently mad by circumstances to vote for an admirer of Pinochet, a preacher of apartheid, a man for whom the gas chambers are a mere “detail.” As I looked down from the steps of the station, on departing this outwardly still-warm and attractive town, I could not help feeling that moral pollution is not so easily perceived. All the more reason to probe below the surface, to sound the alarm and, above all, to seek a cure—unless we want to wake up one day, too late, in a fully contaminated city or country.


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Singer continued to track Le Pen’s rise throughout the 1990s. His dispatches from the time show an increasing concern about Le Pen’s staying power, and even foreshadows the more recent attempts by his youngest daughter, Marine Le Pen, to conceal the party’s underlying fascism by projecting a more smiling, human face:

The Ghosts of Nationalism” (March 23, 1992):

Although unemployment in Western Europe is now roughly three times higher than it was twenty years ago, it has not reached the proportions of the prewar Depression, nor is the fate of its victims comparable. Although discontent is high, workers are not flocking en masse to Le Pen and his equivalents. The danger for Western Europe is not an immediate takeover by various National Fronts. The threat lies in the gradual extension of the disease: the spread of racism and the weakening of class solidarity, sapping society’s capacity for resistance should a really catastrophic slump bring back another bout of the deadly epidemic.

Hate in a Warm Climate” (April 20, 1992):

Le Pen has been told that to win votes he must keep his tongue in check, so he’s on his best behavior. He makes no openly racist or anti-Semitic remarks. Yet, listening carefully, you can still judge the man. His reference to Jean-Claude Gaudin as “the bearded woman”—a not so gentle hint about the incumbent’s alleged homosexuality—gives an idea of his moral tone. The contempt he puts into the words “of every race and religion,” describing demonstrators he saw in London, is also revealing. So is his scorn for those who stir up unpleasant memories of World War II: “They only want to talk about Pétain and Touvier” (a wartime torturer, hidden for years by the clergy and only recently arrested). “Whatever the subject, it reminds them of Hitler and Vichy.”

Liberté, Egalité, Racisme” (October 21, 1996):

In its new posture the National Front is increasingly reminiscent of the prewar fascist movements. Equally worrying is the fact that the phenomenon is not simply French. From Antwerp to Vienna, passing through northern and southern Italy, in the absence of rational prospects, all sorts of forces of unreason are gaining ground. Naturally, the situation should not be overdramatized. The economic crisis is not yet deep enough for a Le Pen to be voted into power in any Western European country. But the poison is spreading. It will not be halted by pandering to prejudices, making compromises, sticking to an increasingly conservative consensus. It won’t be stopped by decree, either. The counteroffensive will require relentless daily battles on the political, social and cultural fronts. If the respectable right is more to blame as the carrier of the disease, the main responsibility, nevertheless, belongs to the left: The rise of Le Pen will not be really resisted until the people, offered the prospect of a radically different society, start struggling for genuine solutions instead of seeking scapegoats. This French lesson, now read throughout Europe, does not lose its validity on crossing the ocean.

Supping with the French Devil” (April 20, 1998):

Much having been written here about the resistible rise of Le Pen, we can sum up the spread of the disease in shorthand. When François Mitterrand was elected president in 1981 the front was insignificant. Deprived of office, the right invented the myth that growing unemployment was due to immigrant labor, forgetting that however low it would stoop, Le Pen could get lower still. Thus he acquired his stock in trade, imposing a phony debate on the nation. But he was able to consolidate his position only because the left failed to offer a radical alternative. With France experiencing a vague consensus on economic policy combined with rising social misery, Le Pen could appear to be the only outsider, gaining support notably among workers and the unemployed. His queer mixture of Reaganomics at home and opposition to globalization is incoherent, so whenever the social movement is active (as in the 1995 winter of discontent) the front is cast aside. But it recovers, feeding on the economic failure of the other protagonists.

Thus the fate of the National Front is really in the hands of the left. If it listens to the international financial establishment, opting for a deflationary policy and the dismantling of the welfare state, it will encourage the spread of the disease, which no changing of the electoral thermometer will cure. Only if it tackles unemployment head-on, radically reshaping French society, will the left be able to contain a cancerous growth that is already serious, although not yet fatal. The responsibility is historical because…the corpses of the past are still unburied. Pace Hegel and Marx, history may repeat itself not as farce but as tragicomedy.

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Why This Woman Should Be Ohio’s Next Secretary of State

Democratic State Senator Nina Turner

Democratic State Senator Nina Turner (AP/Tony Dejak)











Read Next: Bhaskar Sunkara on Chokwe Lumumba.

Want a Feisty Way to Fight Foreclosures?

A home under threat of foreclosure

A home under threat of foreclosure (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

The difference between a sweet victory and a dubious one is often a matter of perspective. Take the housing market which, we’re told, is recovering, albeit slowly and in fits and starts. This represents a trend, an upward-heading line on a chart, and a victory of sorts for the economy. But is it really a victory for the people?

The “housing market” that’s represented by that upward-heading line still comprises millions of underwater mortgage-holders (between 6 and 16 million, depending on who you ask), many of whom are now locked into a David-versus-Goliath battle against creditors that are trying to foreclose and evict them. On this level—where “housing” becomes “houses,” where rates of foreclosure become, for victimized families, “foreclosures”—an overall victory for the market doesn’t mean a whole lot. A trend, that is, has trouble enumerating the individual data points and stories that make it up. To make this dubious victory for the housing market a sweet victory for homeowners, the Home Defenders League, using an innovative concept called Local Principal Reduction, is fighting to write happy endings to some of those stories.

Local Principal Reduction provides a local solution for underwater homeowners facing foreclosure. The CARES program (Community Action to Restore Equity and Stability), developed by Professor Bob Hockett at Cornell Law School, empowers a municipality to work with private investors to acquire the worst private-label securities (PLS) mortgages in town. These are the notorious loans (often predatory) that have been sliced and diced and securitized into investment vehicles by Wall Street, and they are not backed by the federal government via Fannie, Freddie, or Ginnie Mae. Private-label securities are owned by investment trusts, not banks, and as such are not eligible for federal assistance programs. And because the original mortgages have been cut into so many pieces, it’s difficult—and sometimes impossible—to determine who has the authority to refinance them. In other words, underwater homeowners have no one to ask for a life preserver.

But under CARES, a city acquires these underwater mortgages, with the help of San Francisco–based Mortgage Resolution Partners, a law firm with the financial and legal expertise necessary to advise the municipalities and arrange for the private capital that’s necessary to buy the loans. After acquiring the loans, the city then works to refinance these mortgages at current market value, thereby offering a financial life raft—and four walls and a roof—to homeowners facing foreclosure.

But here’s the best part: If creditors refuse to sell, then the city can use the power of eminent domain to seize the properties and refinance them anyway. This saves neighborhoods and prevents the blight and decreasing property values that naturally accompany abandoned homes and empty neighborhoods.

The city of Richmond, California, is at the forefront of the LPR campaign. Bill Falik, an adjunct professor at Berkeley Law, explains: “Richmond has tremendous legal authority to condemn underwater mortgages.… It doesn’t matter if this is a highway project. Foreclosures and underwater properties reduce property taxes and reduce neighboring homes’ value. That’s called blight, and eminent domain is the authority for cities like Richmond to correct blight.” It’s a local solution to a national problem, a sweet victory bearing real results for real people, and more than an abstract line on a graph or a hollow-sounding discussion of “recovery.”


Predictably, the plan has its opponents—namely, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), the industry trade group that represents the thirty or so trusts that own some 5 million PLS mortgages. SIFMA is dead-set against CARES, and it has spent millions to stop it, unleashing its entire arsenal: lawsuits, threatened lawsuits, recall campaigns, radio spots and direct mail. Because of the threatened litigation, CARES is stalled in Richmond, and the city is looking for other municipalities that it can partner with to protect itself. When fighting Wall Street, there’s strength in numbers.

More insidiously, SIFMA has also threatened to raise the price of credit and to categorically deny loans to residents of cities that opt into an LPR program. Denying credit to otherwise credit-worthy people based solely on their city of residence looks suspiciously like illegal redlining. Moreover, since many of the worst PLS mortgages are for houses in predominantly African-American and Latino communities (groups that were targeted by predatory lenders in the first place), this kind of action by SIFMA smacks of discrimination as well.

So what can you do? Kevin Whelan of the Home Defenders League gives three ways to help.

1. Visit fightingforeclosures.org and donate to (or join) the Home Defenders League campaign.

2. Start a campaign or a petition in your community to assist underwater homeowners. E-mail info@homedefendersleague.org for more details.

3. Contact your Representative in Congress and ask him or her to urge HUD and the FHA to comply with antidiscrimination laws that “forbid denying credit to qualified borrowers and ban discrimination based on factors like race and national origin.” Squash SIFMA’s anti-CARES threats.

Read Next: Alexis Goldstein: “Wall Street Group Aggressively Lobbied a Federal Agency to Thwart Eminent Domain Plans”

Stop the Democrats’ Surrender to a Blue Slip

President Barack Obama

President Barack Obama (AP)


Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: an archaic Senate policy is being used by a shameless Republican minority to obstruct the will of the president—and the people he was elected to represent.

You’d be forgiven for thinking I was referring to the filibuster, which has been the Republicans’ most effective and least democratic method of thwarting the will of the majority.


But no, this is another, more obscure and arguably more ridiculous procedural weapon called a “blue slip.” First instituted in 1917, the blue slip process has allowed individual senators to effectively veto a nominee for a circuit court judgeship who hails from their own state. This privilege has been used sparingly by some Judiciary Committee chairmen and more regularly by others. But in recent months, it has been taken to the extreme.


High Time for a Robin Hood Tax



It’s 2024, and a group of four European bankers appears on a talk show to assess the impact of a financial transaction tax (FTT) enacted by eleven European Union nations in 2014. On the host’s right, representatives from France, Spain, and Germany tout the benefits of this “miracle tax”: money to fight extreme poverty, adapt to climate change, combat HIV/AIDS. And on the left, representing the UK (which currently opposes the tax), is a stodgy Brit, undoubtedly miffed that his country has missed out on the Continent’s decade of progress.

The star-studded, three-minute video, directed by David Yates (the Harry Potter series), features Javier Cámara (Talk to Her), Andrew Lincoln (The Walking Dead), Heike Makatsch (Love, Actually), Bill Nighy (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel), and Clémence Poésy (Love, Actually). Nighy, who plays the frustrated Londoner, offers a succinct commentary: “This tiny tax that could do so much good is on the verge of becoming a reality. France, Germany and nine other European countries are about to introduce it. It would be deeply regrettable if the rest of the world were caught on the wrong side of history.”

At a news conference in Paris on February 19, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande reiterated their support for the tax, announcing that they’d like to see the tax implemented before European Parliament elections in late May.

It’s refreshing to see European governments take steps to benefit the many at the (eminently reasonable) expense of the few. “Will the tax be borne by ordinary citizens?” Algirdas Semeta, European Commissioner for Taxation, asked rhetorically in The Guardian last year. “We have taken every measure to ensure that it isn’t. This is a tax on the financial sector, and 85% of liable transactions are purely between financial institutions. Day-to-day financial activities of citizens and businesses are outside its scope. Even if the financial sector passed on some costs to clients, the outcome would not be disproportionate.”

Also known as a “Robin Hood Tax,” a properly implemented FTT can benefit the economy from top to bottom. At the top of the financial food chain, the per-transaction fee offers a necessary check on speculation of the trade-for-the-sake-of-trading variety (“There’s considerable evidence suggesting that too much trading is going on,” writes The New York Times’s Paul Krugman). And an instrument that puts the brakes on rampant speculation and hyperactive trading—by raising the price of such behavior, in this case—is a good thing. In a 1936 analysis of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes noted that “the sins of the London Stock Exchange [were] less than those of Wall Street” in part because “the high brokerage charges and the heavy transfer tax payable to the Exchequer” made financial transactions more expensive in London than in New York. “It is usually agreed,” Keynes wrote drolly, “that casinos should, in the public interest, be inaccessible and expensive.”

And for the 99 percenters, the tax provides a much needed stream of revenue that can be used to combat poverty, climate change, our crumbling national infrastructure and more. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has written, “I urge G20 leaders…to introduce a tax on financial transactions to help low-income countries hit by the economic crisis and to protect poor people from climate change.”


Notably, such a tax is not unheard of in this country: Between 1914 and 1966, the United States levied a 0.04 percent tax on stock trades via a Stock Transfer Tax. While a handful of bills (all sponsored by Democrats) that include some form of an FTT are currently before Congress, the process (and progress) is obviously much farther along in Europe. In January 2013, eleven EU nations—Austria, Belgium, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain—were authorized to proceed with the introduction of a coordinated FTT. A final agreement between the eleven participating governments is expected on May 6, 2014. It will be a sweet victory for Europe, and the spoils are manifold, not least of which is the estimated €31 billion ($42 billion) that the tax is expected to generate each year.

So can we duplicate the victory here? Can we replace some of the Liar’s Poker ethos that got us into this mess? One idea, Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. Peter DeFazio’s (D-Oregon) Wall Street Trading and Speculators Tax Act, “would target financial trading and complex transactions undertaken by financial and investment firms,” and the Congressional Joint Tax Committee has estimated that a similar proposal would bring in over $350 billion over ten years. Says Harkin, “[T]here is no question that Wall Street can easily bear this modest tax. This Wall Street tax is a simple matter of fairness and fiscal sanity.”

What can people do to promote a Sweet Victory here in America? Sarah Anderson, Global Economy Project Director at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, urges citizens to ask their representatives in Congress to co-sponsor the Harkin/DeFazio bill or Rep. Keith Ellison’s (D-Minnesota) Inclusive Prosperity Act. The White House, heretofore unsupportive of FTT proposals, could be spurred to action if it perceived some real momentum building on Capitol Hill. Anderson also encourages people to sign a petition in support of a Robin Hood Tax. The goal is to collect 1 million signatures (There are currently about 640,000 so far), leading to what might be the most popular tax in the history of the world.

Read Next: John Nichols: “Rand Paul Is Wrong: Why the GOP Should Be Moving Backward, Not Forward.

The Comcast/Time Warner Merger Doesn’t Pass the Smell Test

Comcast Center

The Comcast Center in Philadelphia (AP)



The resulting company would have at least 30 million cable customers, just under 30 percent of the TV market, as well as 38 percent of high-speed Internet customers. It will have virtual monopoly cable control over news and public service programming in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York City and Washington, DC. It will be able to exact price concessions from content providers, forcing some out of business, limiting innovation and variety. With net neutrality rules now under assault, it will be positioned to charge discriminatory rates for high-speed access or to discriminate against Netflix and other companies seeking to stream over its cable. And Comcast will be in position to decide what gets priority access and what viewers across much of the nation won’t see.




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