“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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Adam Winkler: Corporations Are People, And They Have More Rights Than You
Ever since Citizens United, the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision allowing unlimited corporate and union spending on political issues, Americans have been debating whether, as Mitt Romney said, “Corporations are people, my friend.” Occupy Wall Street protestors decried the idea, late night comedians mocked it, and reform groups proposed amending the Constitution to eliminate it. Today, however, the Supreme Court endorsed corporate personhood — holding that business firms have rights to religious freedom under federal law. Not only do corporations have rights, their rights are stronger than yours. [..]
Protecting women’s rights, according to the Court, isn’t a good enough reason for the government to force a business corporation, at least a privately held one like chain craft store Hobby Lobby, to include birth control in its insurance contrary to the business owner’s wishes. At least that’s what the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, held in Hobby Lobby. Federal statutes guaranteeing religious freedom to “persons” apply equally to closely held business corporations, and those corporations’ religious liberty is “substantially burdened” by having to provide their employees with contraception. So the rights of employees have to give way to the rights of the corporation.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: 5 Signs the US Is Failing to Protect Women’s Rights in the Workplace
The Prime Minister of Morocco recently compared women to “lanterns” or “chandeliers,” saying that “when women went to work outside, the light went out of their homes.” His remarks, which ran counter to Morocco’s constitutionally-guaranteed rights for women, promptly provoked both street demonstrations and an “I’m not a chandelier” Twitter hashtag.
But before we celebrate our culture’s moral superiority over a Middle Eastern nation – which sometimes seems to be a reflexive instinct in this country – perhaps we should stop and consider the fact that the prime minister’s remarks would not have been out of place in many of our own nation’s political and media conversations.
What’s more, our country’s bias against women in the workplace isn’t just cultural. As is true elsewhere, evidence for it can be found in both policy choices and economic data.
What’s a glass ceiling, after all, if not another place to hang a chandelier?
Here are five signs that much more needs to be done to ensure equal workplace rights for women in the United States.
Noam Chomsky:
Whose Security?
How Washington Protects Itself and the Corporate Sector
The question of how foreign policy is determined is a crucial one in world affairs. In these comments, I can only provide a few hints as to how I think the subject can be productively explored, keeping to the United States for several reasons. First, the U.S. is unmatched in its global significance and impact. Second, it is an unusually open society, possibly uniquely so, which means we know more about it. Finally, it is plainly the most important case for Americans, who are able to influence policy choices in the U.S. — and indeed for others, insofar as their actions can influence such choices. The general principles, however, extend to the other major powers, and well beyond.
There is a “received standard version,” common to academic scholarship, government pronouncements, and public discourse. It holds that the prime commitment of governments is to ensure security, and that the primary concern of the U.S. and its allies since 1945 was the Russian threat.
There are a number of ways to evaluate the doctrine. One obvious question to ask is: What happened when the Russian threat disappeared in 1989? Answer: everything continued much as before.
Ron Johnson and Jonathan Turley: Restoring balance among the branches of government in Washington
The controversy over President Obama’s decision to exchange five high-ranking Taliban leaders for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl last month focused largely on the price paid. There was less focus on Obama ignoring a federal law that required him to notify Congress 30 days in advance of releasing detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Laws such as this have been enacted to allow vital oversight of actions of such consequence. If this were an isolated instance, it could be dismissed. It is not.
After announcing that he intended to act unilaterally in the face of congressional opposition, Obama ordered the non-enforcement of various laws – including numerous changes to the Affordable Care Act – moved hundreds of millions of dollars away from the purposes for which Congress approved the spending and claimed sweeping authority to act without judicial or legislative controls.
A growing crisis in our constitutional system threatens to fundamentally alter the balance of powers – and accountability – within our government. This crisis did not begin with Obama, but it has reached a constitutional tipping point during his presidency. Indeed, it is enough to bring the two of us – a liberal academic and a conservative U.S. senator – together in shared concern over the future of our 225-year-old constitutional system of selfgovernance.
Dean Baker: Will India Be the Uber of the Pharmaceutical Industry?
Many self-styled libertarians have been celebrating the rise of Uber. Their story is that Uber is a dynamic start-up that has managed to disrupt the moribund cab industry. The company now has a market capitalization of $17 billion.
While Uber’s market value probably depends mostly on its ability to evade the regulations that are imposed on its competitors, the company has succeeded in transforming the industry. At the least we are likely to see a modernized regulatory structure that doesn’t saddle cabs with needless regulations and fees.
Unfortunately, the taxi industry is not the only sector of the U.S. economy that can use modernization. The pharmaceutical industry makes the taxi industry look like cutting edge social media. The government imposed barriers to entry in the pharmaceutical industry don’t just raise prices by 20 or 30 percent, as may be the case with taxi fares, they raise prices by a factor or ten, twenty, or even one hundred (that would be 10,000 percent).
Lawrence B. Wilkerson: Empire’s Age-Old Aim: Wealth and Power
In his very excellent book, King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild registers a chapter-long lament near the book’s end that even though in the preceding pages he has chronicled in an unprecedented manner the crimes against humanity of Leopold’s Congo enterprise, so what? Such crimes were almost a concomitant of colonial empire. Britain, France, Germany, the United States — all the so-called civilized colonial powers — were guilty of such crimes. Whether murder and plunder in India, slaughter in Algeria, devastation in Cameroon, or torture and massacre in the Philippines, few western powers can rightfully claim innocence. And, perhaps most worrisome, their national myths mask or even convert most of the crimes, and what the myths don’t eliminate or alter poor education and memory lapses do.
Surely, however, at this opening to the 21st Century, we have made some progress. Our constant rhetoric — particularly from Washington — asserts that we have. International criminal justice and human rights are pursued with relish, are they not?
Not according to the example of Richard Bruce Cheney. As has been the case since humankind began to organize itself, Dick Cheney believes that wealth and power — his and his cronies wealth and power foremost — are still the relevant strategic objectives of empire. King Leopold of Belgium is not dead, simply reincarnated in a more modern form. Torturing people is dependent on a nation’s supposed needs, killing people on the expediency of policy, waging war on monetary and commercial gain, and lying to the people is a highly reputable tactic in pursuit of each. Leopold would love Dick Cheney.
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