Bill Moyers: Bob Herbert and Reihan Salam

on what the 2012 election reveals about America. Bill Moyers: Welcome.It's the weekend after, and Barack Obama is back in the White House, Democrats are back in control of the Senate, and Republicans are back running the House. That's what prevailed before Americans voted, when deadlock reigned in Washington, little got done, and the country was frustrated and angry. Are we in for more of the same? The talk we are hearing in Washington sounds altogether too familiar. So let's consider what's ahead with two people of different philosophies about what should be done. Bob Herbert was a long time liberal columnist for The New York Times until he retired last year and became a distinguished senior fellow for the national think tank Demos. He's been on the road for months now, reporting for his forthcoming book, Wounded Colossus. Reihan Salam writes The Agenda, that's a daily blog for the conservative National Review Online. He is a policy adviser at the think tank Economics 21 and a columnist for Reuters. He is also the co author with Ross Douthat of the much talked about book, Grand New Party, How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.Welcome to you both. Great to see you, Bill. Bill Moyers: Bob, what will you remember about this election? Bob Herbert: Well, the first thing I'll remember is the way people turned out to vote in this election in the face of tremendous voter suppression efforts, and I just think they've been really American heroes because they stood up and said, "You are not going to take the vote away from us." Some people stood in line for six, seven and eight hours. Some had been in areas that had been damaged by the storm, and I just think that they were there upholding democracy. So that's the first thing that I remember about it.      

Ramah Kudaimi: US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation!

This past Tuesday, as Americans went to the polls and re-elected President Obama, Israeli occupation forces kept busy by demolishing Palestinian buildings and cisterns in the villages of al-Deirat and Jawaya in the south Hebron Hills area of the West Bank. The video of the destruction shows Caterpillar and Hyundai bulldozers tearing down a two story home belonging to Mohammad Musa Mohammad Abu Aram and a rainwater cistern belonging to Mahmud Ahmed Nasser Nawaja as Palestinian villagers watched. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Israel has demolished 484 Palestinian owned structures in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem in 2012. More than 600 Palestinians were displaced due to these demolitions, including 304 children. These Palestinian families have had their lives disrupted by Israeli actions that are supported by US policies and funded with our tax dollars. Yet when the presidential candidates were debating foreign policy less than three weeks ago, there was zero discussion about home demolitions, expanding settlements, the continuing occupation of Palestinian lands, or the entrenchment of apartheid policies towards Palestinians. We have had many victories this past year to celebrate in our efforts to change US policy toward Palestinian Israel to support human rights, international law, and equality. This includes the removal of Caterpillar Corporation from an international list of socially responsible companies, prompting financial giant TIAA CREF to divest $72.9 million in Caterpillar stock. But as we continue in our efforts, we are also aware of the immediate impact US support for Israeli occupation and colonization is having on Palestinians as the destruction of their homes, olive trees,, and land continues.

James F Tracy: The Realities of Weather Modification!

Over the past decade evidence has increasingly emerged indicating how geo-engineering and weather modification programs designed to inflict major impacts on the atmosphere and environment are fully operational. Despite such developments the CO2 specific anthropogenic theory of global warming touted by foundation funded environmental groups and public relations dominates much of the popular discourse and the prevailing worldwide view of intellectuals. By drawing attention away from actually existing efforts of atmospheric experimentation and manipulation, such as coordinated efforts are complicit in the impending environmental catastrophe they profess to be rallying against. The repeated claim of CO2 driven climate change without acknowledgment of geo engineering related environmental intervention is a severe perversion of both meaningful scientific inquiry and public opinion with overwhelming implications for all life on earth. While scientists continue research int any global climatic effects of greenhouse gases, we ought to study ways to offset any possible ill effects. Injecting sunlight scattering particles into the stratosphere appears to be a promising approach. Why not do that? Edward Teller: To accept opinions in their terms is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think. "C Wright Mills: For anyone who looks at the sky so often while fostering some recollection of what a sunny day used to resemble, the reality of geo-engineering what are often referred to as chem-trails van no longer be be easily dismissed. For over a decade military and private jet aircraft have been spraying our skies with what numerous independent researchers, journalists, and activists observe to be an admixture of aluminum, barium, strontium, and other dangerous heavy metals. Such substances distributed into the atmosphere as microscopic sub-particulates eventually descend to earth, where they are breathed by living things and absorbed by the soil and plant life. A glimpse into new death technologies intended to modify weather and the environment is in legislation intended to modify weather and the environment is in legislation introduced by Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, investigative writer Amy Worthington wrote almost a decade ago.       

The Economist: Democracy in America. The future of the Republican Party? b

Several of my colleagues have written characteristically incisive pieces about what lessons the Republicans should take from losing an eminently winnable election. Over at the corner, Michael Walsh and Mark Krikorian recommended a few lessons of their own. For Mr Walsh, the number of one lesson learned from Tuesday's defeat is that "the Republicans should never again agree to any debate moderated by any member of the MSM, most especially including former Democratic apparatchiks like Stephanopoulos." That's number one! "Republicans should immediately begin constructing their own media operation," he writes, as if no such enterprises exist. The best rated cable news channel is Fox! Five of the top ten radio programs, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Grenn Beck, Mark Levin and Neal Boortz are conservative. Messrs Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity et al have spent the last four years telling their listeners that Mr Obama is an incompetent Kenyan Marxist Muslim Commie Socialist doomed to defeat. Such sentiments soothe their listeners and are good for ratings, but the parts about incompetence and imminent defeat turned out to be false. The problem is not that conservatives lack media outlets. The problem comes when they fail to venture outside of them. Mr Walsh also advises Republicans to "lay off the social issues", which is probably a good idea. As for Mr Krikorian, he pours water on the suggestion offered by many that Republicans ought to moderate their stance on immigration as a matter of some urgency. His reasoning is this: A more moderate stance on immigration will attract fewer Hispanic voters than it will lose white voters. Thank goodness someone on the right is finally working on the most pressing question question of the day: How can Republicans attract more white voters. Hispanics, you see, "are poorer than average, pay less in taxes, use more in government services, benefit from affirmative action and are less likely to have health insurance, so the Democrats' message of big government and racial quotas is going to resonate with them, as it also has!" 

The Economist: The Obamney Tax Plan. How to solve the fiscal cliff?

Presidents choose their words carefully. So, when Barack Obama talked about "tax reform" but not "tax rates" in his acceptance speech early Wednesday, he was presumably sending a signal, and it was similarly significant that later that day John Boehner repeatedly stated his opposition to higher tax "rates" rather than tax revenue. Within those two statements lies the nucleus of a deal: Raising tax revenue through some means other than higher tax rates. There are myriad ways of doing this, the trick is to find one that both Democrats and Republicans can live with. During the super-committee negotiations last year, Senator Pat Toomey proposed raising $250 billion in revenue over 10 years by closing loopholes. But he would also have cut rates sharply, which would have benefited the richest households most. That was an anathema to Democrats. They wanted more revenue, but not if it made the tax system less progressive. So the price for Democrats is that tax reform must be progressive. After tax incomes of people at the top must be squeezed more than for people at the middle. Thus far, Mr Obama has equated that with allowing the top two income tax brackets to return to their pre-2001 levels. But there is an alternative route to the same goal that does not require higher rates, and it comes courtesy of Mitt Romney. Recall that when asked how he would pay for a 20% cut to marginal rates, he proposed a cap on deductions, an idea proposed by Martin Feldstein, Maya MacGuineas and Daniel Feenberg. I don't have a ready estimate of how much capping deductions for those earning more than $250,000 would raise, but you can ballpark it by looking the Tax Policy Center's estimates!

Ellen Brown: It's the Interest, Stupid! Why Bankers Rule the World!

In the 2012 edition of Occupy Money, released last week, Professor Margret Kennedy writes that a stunning 35% to 40% of everything we buy goes to interest. This interest goes to bankers, financiers, and bondholders, who take a 35% to 40% cut of our GDP. That helps explain how wealth is systematically transferred from Main Street to Wall Street. The rich get progressively richer at the expense of the poor, not just because of Wall Street greed, but because of the inexorable mathematics of our private banking system. This hidden tribute to the banks will come as a surprise to most people, who think that if they pay their credit card bills on time and don't take out loans, they aren't paying interest. This, says Dr Kennedy, is not true. Tradesmen, suppliers, wholesalers and retailers all along the chain of production rely on credit to pay there bills. They must pay for labor and materials before they have a product to sell, and before the end buyer pays for the product 90 days later. Each supplier in the chain adds interest to its production costs, which are then passed on to the ultimate consumer. Dr Kennedy cites interest charges ranging from 12% for garbage collection, to 38% for drinking water, to 77% for rent in public housing in her native Germany. Her figures are drawn from the research of economist Helmut Creutz, writing in German and interpreting Bundesbank publications. They apply to the expenditures of German households for everyday goods and services in 2006, but similar figures are seen in financial sector profits in the United States, where they composed a whopping 40% of US business profits in 2006. That was five times the 7% made by the banking sector in 1980. Bank assets, financial profits, interest, and debt have all been growing exponentially. Exponential growth in financial sector profits has occurred at the expense of the non financial sectors, where incomes have at best grown linearly. 

RJ Eskow: 7 Big Lessons from Obama's Win.

So, let's get this straight: A Republican President is re-elected in 2004 with 284 electoral votes, and the pundits say he has the "political capital" to push an extreme right wing mandate. A Democratic President gets re-elected in 2012 with 303 electoral votes, and they're telling us he needs to unite a divided country. Nonsense! This election was a clear and unequivocal victory for the populist positions the President took on the campaign trail. Don't believe the hype: This was a great night for progressives, populists, and agents of change. Our political system may be dominated by big money, but this was a victory for the 99 Percent. We've been through our dark night of the soul. Now it's time for inspiration, and for determination to build on these victories in the weeks, months, and years to come. I'm not known for being a "silver lining" kind of guy, but there's a lot of silver in the sky this morning. Here are seven lessons from this election that have been under reported, or overlooked completely in all the media frenzy. They include Occupy Wall Street's victory, the Harold and Kumar factor, Harry Reid's big mandate, and the fact that "Socialism" sells. 1. Occupy Wall Street won big. The Occupy movement may have disappeared from the national media eye, but this election was a big win for its vision and language. As that movement caught the national imagination, the President quickly and wisely adopted its populist rhetoric. That may have hurt the tender feelings of America's CEO's, especially on Wall Street, but it helped cement his decisive victory. The nature of that victory was underscored by wins for staunch progressives like Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown, even as far right candidates like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock went down in defeat. The President's populist theme didn't end with his victory. He spoke last night of a "generous America," a "compassionate America," a "tolerant America." His deeply moving victory speech mentioned deficit reduction once, but emphasized the following themes: Our "common bond." The weakening effect of inequality. The destructive power of a warming planet. The best schools and teachers. Ending our two wars. Investment in tecnology and discovery and innovation, with good jobs to follow.