“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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Robert Kuttner: Lousy Work: Will it Break Through as a Political Issue?
For decades, the increasing precariousness of work has been a source of mass frustration for tens of millions of Americans. But the issue has been largely below the political radar.
Politicians ritually invoke good jobs at good wages, yet presidents have been unwilling to name, much less remedy, the deep economic forces that are turning payroll jobs into what I’ve termed “The Task Rabbit Economy” — a collection of ad hoc gigs with no benefits, no job security, no career paths, and no employer reciprocity for worker diligence.
But there are signs that maybe this issue is starting to break through.
One manifestation of job insecurity is extremes of inequality as corporations, banks, and hedge funds capture more than their share of the economy’s productive output at the expense of workers. The Occupy movement gave that super-elite a name: The One Percent.
Dr. Jason Johnson: NAACP’S Net Failure in Ferguson
The shooting of teenager Mike Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri has mutated from a tragic local killing to a national crisis. The Ferguson police, operating with incompetence worthy of the film Police Academy and the aggression of an occupying army have turned a possible criminal act by a cop into a human rights crisis in America’s heartland. Activists and organizations from Al Sharpton and the ACLU to new NAACP president Cornell Brooks descended upon the town to express outrage, call for justice and fight for solutions. While it helps for many of these civil rights organizations to be at ground zero, what would really make a big impact on Ferguson and other cities in racial strife should happen back in Washington DC. If the NAACP and other civil rights organizations really care about justice, accountability and activism, they’ll change their bizarre stance on net neutrality. We would never know what was going on in Ferguson without a free and open Internet and for some reason the NAACP is fighting to shut that down.
Let’s step back a few weeks. On July 18, Michael Brown was still alive, Darren Williams was patrolling the streets like a white Eddie Walker, and the most important national story out of the St. Louis metro area was whether Michael Sam could make the Tony Dungy All-Star squad. What escaped the attention of all but a few tech media was that on that day the NAACP, the National Action Network, the Urban League, 100 Black Men, the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators, the Council of Korean Americans, Rainbow PUSH and about a dozen other civil rights organizations filed a brief to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) basically begging to end net neutrality.
What does net neutrality have to do with Ferguson, Missouri? Everything. Net neutrality means all content on the Internet has to be treated equally.
When the police won’t take no for an answer
The protests in Ferguson, Missouri, set off by a policeman’s shooting of an unarmed black teen last week, appear to be spinning out of control – not because crowds are rioting nightly but because law enforcement is operating as though they are in a war zone. Peaceful protesters are facing nothing short of a domestic army, armed with military equipment, waiting for a provocation.
As the protests progressed, the police have used noncompliance, or the failure to obey their every order, as their justification for whatever violence came next. That’s also the excuse that the police used to explain why an officer shot Michael Brown. They said the incident started because Brown didn’t comply with an order to move, so it is he who is to blame.
What happens if you don’t comply when the police give you an order? What rights do you really have? How free are you, really, when the authorities have weapons pointed at you or when they have the right to draw a weapon and use it with relative impunity?
David Sirota: Is Corruption a Constitutional Right?
Wall Street is one of the biggest sources of funding for presidential campaigns, and many of the Republican Party’s potential 2016 contenders are governors, from Chris Christie of New Jersey and Rick Perry of Texas to Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Scott Walker of Wisconsin. And so, last week, the GOP filed a federal lawsuit aimed at overturning the pay-to-play law that bars those governors from raising campaign money from Wall Street executives who manage their states’ pension funds.
In the case, New York and Tennessee’s Republican parties are represented by two former Bush administration officials, one of whose firms just won the Supreme Court case invalidating campaign contribution limits on large donors. In their complaint, the parties argue that people managing state pension money have a First Amendment right to make large donations to state officials who award those lucrative money management contracts.
Malcolm Harris: When your employer doesn’t consider you an employee
Workers have the right to know their true employment status
Do you have a job? It seems like a simple question, but millions of Americans aren’t quite sure one way or another. The growth of nontraditional employment means more and more people are doing what can be recognized as work without knowing their exact employment status. Between independent contracts and internships, firms are increasingly reliant on marginally attached workers, for whom it is hard to say what labor regulations apply.
A newly reproposed law seeks to fix this ambiguity by forcing businesses to clarify – in writing – whether their workers are employed or not. Introduced by Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., in May, the Payroll Fraud Prevention Act of 2014 (a reinvigorated attempt at a bill that stalled last year) would reform the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 to reduce employee misclassification. If the bill becomes law, it will define nonemployees – people engaged for labor or services who are not employees – and require firms to issue notices informing workers of their official classification, their rights under the law and options for seeking remedy if they think they have been misclassified. The act would go a long way to leveling the informational asymmetry that plagues the labor market.
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