“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.
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Heidi Moore: How low can you get: the minimum wage scam
Wonder why benefit spending is rising? Simple: corporations get away with crappy wages, so government has to make up the rest
It’s time to get real. Allowing the federal minimum wage to be so low means knowing that it will cost us all in Medicare, food stamp and social security payments later. While some in Congress – particularly on the conservative side – have mistakenly insisted on austerity and complained about the rising cost of federal benefits, they also seem not to have done the math to figure out why those costs are going up.
The solution is simple: raise the minimum wage, add benefits, and so reduce government benefit spending. If the minimum wage remains low, and benefits sparse, government spending on benefits will continue to rise.
Barbara Garson; How Corporate America Used the Great Recession to Turn Good Jobs Into Bad Ones
Abracadabra: You’re a Part-Timer
Watch closely: I’m about to demystify the sleight-of-hand by which good jobs were transformed into bad jobs, full-time workers with benefits into freelancers with nothing, during the dark days of the Great Recession. [..]
Here’s the truly mysterious aspect of this “recovery”: 21% of the jobs lost during the Great Recession were low wage, meaning they paid $13.83 an hour or less. But 58% of the jobs regained fall into that category. A common explanation for that startling statistic is that the bad jobs are coming back first and the good jobs will follow.
But let me suggest another explanation: the good jobs are here among us right now — it’s just their wages, their benefits, and the long-term security that have vanished.
“Just lunch, or is it Campaign 2016 just getting started?” one pundit breathlessly asks of a meal between President Obama and his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. The New York Times does a deep dive into the Clinton Foundation, while others list “The People Already Rearranging Their Lives for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Campaign.” And every major news outlet has asked some form of this question: Is America ready for a woman president? [..]
Will shattering the Oval Office’s glass ceiling and electing a madam president be an inspiring achievement for this country? Of course. Do we also need madam mayors, madam senators, madam councilwomen, madam sheriffs, madam governors and madam congresswomen all across the nation? You betcha.
Naureen Shah: Obama has not delivered on May’s promise of transparency on drones
An escalation of drone strikes in Yemen highlights the fact that the US public is still in the dark about this use of lethal force
The past two weeks have seen an escalation in drone strikes more dramatic than any since 2009. [..]
Earlier this summer, however, there was hope for a different way forward. In late May, the White House released more information about US drone strikes than it ever had before. Following a major address on national security by President Obama, the government pledged to keep sharing “as much information as possible”.
In fact, since May, the White House has not officially released any new information on drone strikes (though leaks still abound). While NSA surveillance has taken center-stage, the government’s policy of secrecy and obfuscation on drones persists, too. Past critics of the drone program – ranging from Senator Rand Paul (Republican, Kentucky) to Senator Ron Wyden (Democrat, Oregon) – should take notice. It is time to renew and expand the demand for answers about who is being killed.
Amy Davidson: Breaking the Rules Thousands of Times at the N.S.A.
But how many thousands? As it turns out, there are numbers packed into the numbers. An “incident” can have affected multiple people-even multitudes. In a single one of the two thousand seven hundred and seventy-six cases, someone at the N.S.A. made a mistake in entering a number into a search request. As a result, instead of pulling information on phone calls from Egypt (country code 20) the agency got data on “a large number” of calls from Washington, D.C. (area code 202). How many, and what did they learn? There are more Egyptians than there are Washingtonians, but the N.S.A.’s mandate forbids it from spying on Americans, and singling out an area as politicized as Washington seems particularly unfortunate. Mistyping the country code for Iran could have left analysts looking at calls in North Carolina and Louisiana. Another incident involved “the unlawful retention of 3,032 files that the surveillance court had ordered the NSA to destroy…. Each file contained an undisclosed number of telephone call records.” The Post said that it was not able to tell how many Americans were affected in all. Those two examples suggest that the number could be very, very big-even by the N.S.A.’s standards.
Michelle Chen: Caring for Workers Who Care for Our Loved Ones
For many seniors, growing older means facing new kinds of stress-such as fragile health, a tight budget on a fixed income, or the travails of living alone.
And for the people who care for the aging, the stress can be just as severe. When her client is going through a rough time, one domestic worker says she lives through every minute of it, too: “Sometimes we stay there for five days…and we don’t know what’s outside…You cannot leave the job.”
Stories like this one, recorded as part of a survey of New York’s care workers, form the invisible pillar of an evolving industry that is making the private home the center of public health, and in the process, reshaping our relationships of family, work, community and social service. Yet the home care workforce, which is driven largely by poor women of color, mirrors inequities embedded in the low-wage economy. At work, caregivers manage the lives of our loved ones while often facing exploitation and abuse, and after a long day of delivering comfort to vulnerable clients, many struggle themselves to cope with ingrained poverty their communities.
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