“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.
Wednesday is Ladies’ Day
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Colleen Rowley: Why Do Americans Hate Beheadings But Love Drone Killings?
The answer lies in human psychology. And probably like the old observation about history, people who refuse to understand human psychology are doomed to be victims of psychological manipulation. How is it that even members of peace groups have now come to support US bombing? One lady framed the issue like this: “I request that we discuss and examine why the videotaped beheading of a human being is understood to be more egregious than the explosion (almost totally invisible to the public) of a human being by a missile or bomb fired from a drone.”
There are at least four main reasons that explain why Americans care far more about the beheadings (thus far) of two Americans and one U.K citizen, than they care — here’s the polling — about the thousands of foreign victims of US drone bombing. Here’s how people are likely being manipulated into believing that more US bombing is the answer to such terroristic killings even when almost all military experts have admitted that it won’t work and “there’s no military solution”
Zoë Carpenter: Who Profits From Plans to Lock Up More Immigrant Families? Private Prison Companies
Last week, the federal government announced that it will detain as many as 2,400 women and children on property in Dilley, Texas, that is currently used as a “man camp” for oilfield workers. The new facility will be the largest family detention center in the country, and the third to open since the number of children and families crossing the US-Mexico border shot up early in the summer. Since then, the number of minors caught at the border has fallen back below last year’s levels.
Human rights groups are alarmed that the administration is nevertheless planning to double the number of people in family detention. The controversial practice of locking up women and their children, many of whom are awaiting asylum hearings, had been all but abandoned before this year. Calls for closing the two other centers opened this summer in Texas and New Mexico have intensified in recent weeks due to reports of “deplorable” conditions. [..]
Another cause for concern is the company that the government chose to operate the new detention center, Corrections Corporation of America. CCA got its start in Texas three decades ago when it scored a contract for a federal immigration detention center in Houston. It’s now the largest private prison operator in the country. CCA has been sued a number of times for negligence, abuse and other mistreatment. The company is currently under investigation for allegations of fraud and corruption at the Idaho Correction Center.
In a Washington paralyzed by partisan division, there is apparently one area of bipartisan agreement: Congress should ignore its constitutional mandate to vote on war with the Islamic State, a conflict that President Obama admits will take years.
The president says he’d “welcome” congressional support but doesn’t need it. Democratic leaders Rep. Nancy Pelosi (CA) and Sen. Harry Reid (NV) agree. Republican House Speaker John Boehner (OH) argues Congress should postpone any debate until next year. He allows it might be in the “nation’s interest” for members of Congress to weigh in, but it certainly isn’t an imperative. The leaders of Congress treat their own body as vestigial, offering little beyond symbolic gesture on the vital question of war and peace.
This bipartisan consensus about expanding the executive’s war-making powers directly contradicts the Constitution of the United States. The founders gave Congress, not the president, the power to declare war. Their purpose was clear. War was the instrument by which kings and dictators consolidated power and impoverished nations. They feared that the executive by its nature was more given to war. James Wilson, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, summarized the consensus: Giving the power to Congress “will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress.”
Michelle Chen: Is ‘Big Data’ Actually Reinforcing Social Inequalities?
Sometimes it feels like we live in an era when information is finally becoming “free”-unlimited media access, the “quantified self” of twenty-four-hour wellness tracking, endless dating possibilities. But there’s nothing inherently progressive about Big Data, and all that data collection can actually bolster inequality and undermine personal privacy. A new report reveals that when Big Data creeps into our work and financial lives, civil rights may get severely squeezed.
The report, “Civil Rights, Big Data, and Our Algorithmic Future” by the think tank Robinson + Yu, confronts the challenges of an information landscape where knowledge can be oppressively overwhelming. While it’s true that Big Data-the amassing of huge amounts of statistical information on social and economic trends and human behavior-can be empowering for some, it’s often wielded as a tool of control. While we’re busy tracking our daily carb intake, every data packet we submit, each image we toss into the cloud, is hoarded and parsed by powerful institutions that manage our everyday lives.
Data collection has accelerated due to technological advancements, the declining cost of data mining and storage, and the intensified surveillance climate of post-9/11 America. But while the Algorithmic Future seems inevitable and exciting, say the authors, it creates gray areas in labor rights, privacy and ethics.
Cori Crider: Gitmo hunger strikes are a cry for help. Why is the US fighting back with secret torture?
Force-feeding at Guantánamo shames America – not just in the bad old days of George W Bush, but today, in 2014. And you deserve to hear the truth, loud and clear
“Safe, Humane, Legal, Transparent”: so goes the slogan of the world’s most famous offshore prison. It’s an Obama-era rebrand, a bid by Gitmo’s PR people to persuade Americans that today’s is a kinder, gentler Guantánamo Bay. There’s just one wrinkle: Gitmo is stilldangerous, nasty, lawless and secretive – and the evidence just keeps piling up.
At the forefront of this war over the truth is the first-ever trial concerning the practice of force-feeding prisoners on hunger strike, due to start Monday. My client, Abu Wa’el Dhiab – a Syrian man who has never been charged, and indeed has been cleared to leave Guantánamo by the US government for more than five years – has been fighting for over a year to reform the way he and other hunger-strikers have been treated. He’s finally about to have his day in court.
But the Obama administration refuses to accept this unusual intrusion of justice into its island idyll. On Friday, US justice department attorneys filed a motion asking the court to hear all evidence in the trial entirely in closed court, save a short, anodyne opening statement from lawyers on both sides.
Donna Smiith: US Health Care System Cartel… Until Death Us Do Part
One common definition of a cartel is: an association of manufacturers or suppliers with the purpose of maintaining prices at a high level and restricting competition. Or if you prefer this definition from Merriam-Webster, here you go: car-tel, noun: a group of businesses that agree to fix prices so they all will make more money. I think that pretty much sums up what the U.S. health care system has become.
If you doubt that collusion exists in the provision of health care in the profit-driven U.S. health care system, please think again. Why and how would all the health insurance prices, drug prices, and sometimes the provider charges and practices all end up being within a small window of pricing and policy? (Oh, and the definition of collusion? Here you go: collusion is a secret cooperation for an illegal or dishonest purpose.) You may try to cite some economic factoring and actuarial analysis as the reasoning behind the pricing, but then how do the profits all balloon to such grotesque levels, too, if not through price fixing and the collusion of the industry to hang as tightly together on the cartel agreements as they possibly can?
As a patient, as a policy holder, and as a caregiver to another patient, I have grown so weary of needing to play my part in the profit-taking every time I am in need of medical help. If holistic or alternative medicine were such a great alternative for the treatment of all illness, I would have gone that route by now, but the costs and the lack of any insurance coverage for most of these alternatives makes that an impossibility even if I believe some of those treatments are really good. So, when I am sick and cannot get better on my own or when my husband is ill and cannot get better on his own, we are at the mercy of the health care cartel.
I often wonder why all this collusion is allowable when the U.S. Justice Department says it isn’t legal in the U.S. Check it out, from the U.S. government: When competitors collude, prices are inflated and the customer is cheated. Price fixing, bid rigging, and other forms of collusion are illegal and are subject to criminal prosecution by the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice.
Recent Comments