“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
Wednesday is Ladies’ Day
Michelle Chen: Too Big to Sue? High Court Thwarts Wal-Mart Gender Discrimination Case
As legions of Walmart workers shuffled into work on Monday, the Supreme Court smacked down a major class-action lawsuit that might potentially have shifted the legal landscape on women’s rights in the workplace.
The gender-discrimination lawsuit against the world’s most notorious retail giant had been pending for years. Now the Court’s majority opinion has declared that, in light of “Walmart’s size and geographical scope,” the plaintiffs could not provide “significant proof that Wal-Mart operated under a general policy of discrimination. That is entirely absent here.”
And with that, Justice Antonin Scalia rendered perhaps hundreds of thousands of working women absent from the discussion on gender discrimination in today’s sink-or-swim economy. The split in the most significant part of the judgment, the class-action aspect, was five to four, putting all the female justices in the minority. The division ironically suggested a lack of self-reflection on how structural gender discrimination works in powerful institutions.
Amy Goodman: Japan’s Meltdowns Demand New No-Nukes Thinking
New details are emerging that indicate the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan is far worse than previously known, with three of the four affected reactors experiencing full meltdowns. Meanwhile, in the U.S., massive flooding along the Missouri River has put Nebraska’s two nuclear plants, both near Omaha, on alert. The Cooper Nuclear Station declared a low-level emergency and will have to close down if the river rises another 3 inches. The Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant has been shut down since April 9, in part due to flooding. At Prairie Island, Minn., extreme heat caused the nuclear plant’s two emergency diesel generators to fail. Emergency-generator failure was one of the key problems that led to the meltdowns at Fukushima.
In May, in reaction to the Fukushima disaster, Nikolaus Berlakovich, Austria’s federal minister of agriculture, forestry, environment and water management, convened a meeting of Europe’s 11 nuclear-free countries. Those gathered resolved to push for a nuclear-free Europe, even as Germany announced it will phase out nuclear power in 10 years and push ahead on renewable-energy research. Then, in last week’s national elections in Italy, more than 90 percent of voters resoundingly rejected Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s plans to restart the country’s nuclear-power-generation plans.
Massive spending cuts will make the future bleaker for millions of Americans.
The number of poor children had already grown by 2.1 million in 2009 over pre-recession levels, with continuing high joblessness among parents raising concerns that poverty will continue to worsen for some time. Since kids who spend more than half their childhood in poverty earn on average 39 percent less than median income as adults, we can expect lasting costs that will hurt the nation’s future economic growth.
And yet, a majority of House lawmakers want to narrow the deficit by making things worse for today’s kids.
Sarah Azaransky: Wal-Mart Ruling Erodes Rights of Women of Color
The Supreme Court’s ruling to throw out the sex discrimination class action lawsuit against Wal-mart undermines employment rights of women of color.
First to the ruling. The Court ruled that women did not show that Wal-Mart had a policy of discrimination. Since each Wal-Mart supervisor has discretion over pay and promotion, Justice Scalia concluded there was no “glue holding the alleged reasons for all those decisions together.”
Justice Ginsburg, joined by the Court’s three liberal justices, dissented on this point. Citing evidence that “gender bias suffused Wal-mart company culture,” Ginsburg affirmed, “managers, like all humankind, may be prey to biases of which they are unaware.”
While all the plaintiffs in the case were women, thirty five percent were women of color and Betty Dukes, the case’s namesake and employee of the Pittsburg, CA store, is African American.
Laura Flanders: Walmart: Too Big to Sue?
The Roberts court decision to block the class action lawsuit for sex discrimination effectively defines Walmart as ‘too big to sue’
Let’s get this right: the world’s biggest boss, supported by companies as diverse as Altria, Bank of America, Microsoft and General Electric and backed up by the godfather of big business (the US Chamber of Commerce) has persuaded the US supreme court that thousands of women workers can’t possibly share enough of an interest to constitute a class?
It’s hard to know which part of the court’s decision in Dukes v Walmart hurts equity most: the assault on class-action jurisprudence generally, at a time of shrinking tools for workers seeking redress, or the defeat of history’s biggest gender-based claim before a court that, for the first time, includes two women, one of whom (Ruth Bader Ginsburg) made her reputation in sex discrimination law.
Maryam Al-Zoubi: Source of Missing Jobs in America Found: Forced Laborers
With unemployment at a near historic high in the United States, could you imagine any American company bringing in foreign workers to work for them below the minimum wage and with no benefits? Most people would say no. But can you imagine those same Americans forcing foreign workers to stay here, with no pay, and constant abuse? That is actually happening in this country today.
Forced labor is a real phenomenon in the United States agriculture business. Without awareness and investigation into where our supplies come from and who businesses are hiring, the American people become unwitting complicit supporters of labor trafficking.
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