“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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Steven W. Thrasher: Obama failed Ferguson. The prosecutor is pathetic. Between the split-screen, the protesters get it
There we had Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, finally admitting on one side of the television that structural racism is real. There we finally had him saying that when it comes to police terrorizing black folks, “communities of color aren’t just making these problems up”. But, in nearly the same breath on Monday night after the grand-jury decision in Ferguson, as the people were taking to the streets in cities across the nation, the president also said he doesn’t believe unequal enforcement of the law is “the norm. I don’t think that’s true for the majority of communities or the vast majority of law enforcement officials.”
It wasn’t just surreal, then, to witness Obama’s anti-Trayvon Martin moment at the very same time a split-screen on the other side of the TV showed police launching smoke bombs at protesters in Ferguson. It was heartbreaking. Because if that was reality rising up through the gap on Monday night, the reality is that legal discrimination is the norm – and our law enforcement officials refuse to acknowledge reality. [..]
So it was nothing short of a gut punch to see our African American president on the wrong side of the gap between the fantasy of what the law does and the reality that people live. Obama, in that moment, gave credence to the fiction that if citizens just faithfully adhere to being “a nation built on the rule of law”, the result will be justice. Perhaps he will finally go to Ferguson tomorrow, but today, we are a nation looking upon a pile of ashes, death and broken dreams.
New York Times Editorial Board: Mass Imprisonment and Public Health
When public health authorities talk about an epidemic, they are referring to a disease that can spread rapidly throughout a population, like the flu or tuberculosis.
But researchers are increasingly finding the term useful in understanding another destructive, and distinctly American, phenomenon – mass incarceration. This four-decade binge poses one of the greatest public health challenges of modern times, concludes a new report released last week by the Vera Institute of Justice.
For many obvious reasons, people in prison are among the unhealthiest members of society. Most come from impoverished communities where chronic and infectious diseases, drug abuse and other physical and mental stressors are present at much higher rates than in the general population. Health care in those communities also tends to be poor or nonexistent.
It is only when you encounter other people’s holiday mythologies that the arbitrary and gross nature of your own become apparent. For a foreigner, Thanksgiving offers a particularly rich array of incomprehensible traditions – all those combinations of sweet and savoury, the 70s provenance of many of the dishes and the fetishisation of the turkey itself. What with that and the root vegetables, by 4pm on Thanksgiving afternoon, to the outsider it can all start to feel a bit Wicker Man – the creepy 1973 original, not the loveably camp Nic Cage remake.
I don’t claim to fully understand this American holiday – I have only lived in the US for seven years. But from my own experience of Christmas, I know too well the hysteria that can be brought on by deviating from the way things have always been done. There was, for instance, my dad’s heroic efforts one year, to suggest that we have steak instead of turkey on Christmas day, a well-meaning but egregious subversion of the first rule of the holidays: nothing is to change, ever. That includes the hour at which one eats, table settings, dress code, TV viewing, side dishes and whether or not you can set foot outside the house during the period of holiday lockdown. (The answer is, of course, always no.)
Richard (RJ) Eskow: Prosecute Now: The Justice Department Can Still Act Against Bad Bankers
It’s been a grim period for American justice. Despite compelling evidence of widespread bank fraud in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis — and despite all those billion-dollar settlements — prosecutors have not indicted executives at any major U.S. bank. This stands in contrast to the much smaller savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, which led to the conviction of more than a thousand bankers.
And as the Justice Department’s criminal division remained idle in the aftermath of 2008, the statute of limitations passed for most of bankers’ crimes.
But there’s a ray of hope: The bankers’ own deep-seated propensity for cheating and corruption may have given prosecutors a new opportunity to indict them. With the upcoming departure of Attorney General Eric Holder, there is the chance to forge a new approach toward Wall Street lawbreaking by pursuing evidence of wrongdoing wherever it may lead.
The stakes are high. As long as the bankers’ culture of corruption goes unpunished, the safety of the global economy — and of individual families’ well-being — remains at risk.
Kwei Quartey: Ebola’s Racial Disparity
The most effective treatment for Ebola might be having white skin.
American healthcare workers Nancy Writebol, Kent Brantly, Craig Spencer, and Rick Sacra, as well as NBC cameraman Ashoka Mupko, were all beneficiaries of the medical sophistication of the U.S. hospital system.
All of them contracted Ebola in West Africa and lived to tell the tale, emerging from the hospital Ebola-free and appearing remarkably robust. They benefited from early diagnosis, prompt evacuation to the leading U.S. special isolation centers, and in some cases, treatment with convalescent serum and the experimental drug ZMapp.
The story is quite different for some other high-profile Ebola victims.
Martin Salia, a legal and permanent Maryland resident, was the medical director of Sierra Leone’s Kissy United Methodist Hospital and its only full-time physician. As one of a shockingly small number of doctors in that country-a mere 136 for a population of 6 million-Salia was a rare breed of physician capable of treating anything from orthopedic injuries to myocardial infarction. [..]
The physicians who have cared for these patients themselves would deny that any racial bias ever consciously entered into their decisions over choice of therapy. That, however, is exactly the trouble. Most racial bias among doctors is unconscious, meaning we must carefully consider whether our medical decisions reflect a double standard in the treatment of our patients-Ebola-infected or otherwise.
David M. Perry: Playing politics with the disabled
The disabled deserve the chance to work, save and be as independent as they can
The Achieving a Better Life Act (ABLE) is one of those rare good ideas that seem to have a chance of making it through Congress and becoming law. The bill is designed to tweak the tax code so that people on Social Security disability insurance (SSDI) can earn and even save some money without threatening their benefits. [..]
The House version of the bill operates with a narrower definition of disability than the Senate’s – a sign of a deeper political debate about just whom SSDI is supposed to cover. Initially, the House Ways and Means Committee advocated cutting other disability benefits (PDF) to pay for ABLE, potentially playing one group of disabled against another. The powerful right-wing Heritage Foundation has come out against ABLE and listed it as a lame-duck bill to quash.
The pressing need for the passage of ABLE and the rhetoric employed by its detractors illuminates some of the challenges of being disabled or caring for someone who is disabled in 21st century America. For a country whose rhetoric often emphasizes self-reliance and hard work, the status quo is built around limiting the independence of disabled people. But many conservatives seem unwilling to fix the situation for all disabled Americans, preferring to use the disabled as pawns in a political effort to identify and separate the worthy from the unworthy disabled and poor.
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