“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.
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Amy B. Dean: Time for a moratorium on charter schools
Charters have failed to deliver, and their expansion should be put on hold
Charter schools are everywhere. Not long ago, these publicly funded but privately run institutions were a relative rarity. Those that existed served mostly as experimental academies whose successful lessons could be applied elsewhere in their host school districts. But in the last 15 years, swaths of the U.S. public education system have been turned over to charters. In fact, they are being used as a means to crush teachers’ unions and to pursue high-stakes testing.
Charter advocates justify this ascent by promising an antidote to the disappointing outcomes of traditional public schools in segregated and underfunded urban districts. But the research is in: Charter schools have failed to deliver on their promises.
It is time lawmakers freeze their growth and consider how to provide the best education possible for all students.
Bryce Covert: Education Alone Won’t Put an End to Equal Pay Days
Today is Equal Pay Day, the dismal holiday where women celebrate the fact that, on average, their earnings have caught up to what men made in one year last year, given that when they work full-time, year-round they make just 78 percent of what men make. [..]
But some think change is coming faster than that. They base this hope on the fact that today’s young women are getting college degrees at a faster pace than today’s young men. Given that a college degree represents a more than $400 earnings premium every week over that of a high school graduate, that extra money should, they reason, help women earn their way out of the gap.
But while education may boost earnings for each college-educated woman over her less educated sister, that doesn’t put her on better, or even equal, footing with a similarly educated brother. The gender wage gap still shows up at every education level (pdf).
In the coming weeks, Congress must decide whether to renew the Patriot Act, which the National Security Agency (NSA) uses to collect Americans’ telephone records in bulk, regardless of whether they are suspected of any criminal or terrorist activity. These records can tell the government a lot about our private lives – whether we called a psychiatrist or a gun dealer, for example – and the debate likely will focus on how to protect Americans’ right to privacy against unwarranted intrusions. But there is another important issue at stake in the run up to the Patriot Act’s sunset: the role of the foreign intelligence surveillance court that supervises NSA programs.
Like the president and Congress, courts have limits on their authority. Under the Constitution, our courts don’t give advice – they decide concrete disputes. In practical terms, that generally means there must be at least two parties present in court, and they must disagree over the lawfulness of particular actions that one or more of them has taken.
Anna Lappé: The long, dirty trail of fake science
Revealing Big Oil’s role in climate change denialism
“Doubt is our product,” (pdf) wrote executives for tobacco giant Brown & Williamson in a now infamous 1969 memo on industry communications strategy. The memo was revealed during discovery in class-action lawsuits against tobacco companies that would eventually yield a trove of 85 million pages. Among those pages are details about the public relations playbook of an industry that – as far back as 1958 – knew that smoking caused cancer and used public relations to fight regulation for decades.
“Merchants of Doubt,” a brilliant new film from documentarian Robert Kenner (of “Food Inc.” fame), reveals this spin and tracks how other industries, from chemical manufacturers to pharmaceuticals, are ripping pages from Big Tobacco’s playbook to fight their own regulation and public scrutiny.
Based on the book of the same name by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, the film reveals, in particular, Big Oil’s role in climate change denialism. It makes the argument that the world’s biggest energy companies funded PR and lobbying firms that fomented doubt about climate science and thereby stalled action on climate policy. The film pulls back the curtain on the backstage battle to win the hearts and minds of the American public, with nothing short of a stable climate in the balance.
Michelle Chen: Can Labor Bring Wall Street Back to Main Street?
The 2007 banking collapse exposed the abysmal gap between the titans of finance and the 99 percent. But long ago, there was one place where Wall Street and Main Street intersected: at the teller window of your local retail bank. Some community activists want to pull Wall Street back toward an era when banking was done by real people, and retail banks invested in the neighborhood instead of pushing consumers into foreclosure. Can we bring back your friendly bank teller?
Seven years since Wall Street imploded, it seems the banking sector has rebounded far faster than the communities it has devastated, according to a report published by Center for Popular Democracy (pdf) (CPD), which builds on a global campaign to advocate for fair labor and corporate accountability in Big Banks.
The report finds that poor communities tend to be both underbanked and overexploited by banks. Though lenders no longer give away subprime mortgages like candy, bank chains still degrade vulnerable consumers. Roughly a quarter of households nationwide are considered unbanked or underbanked, lacking access to basic financial resources like a checking account. Big Banks instead market relatively high-risk financial products to the poor, while ignoring the essential economic vehicles that help build assets prudently and realistically. Despite their relatively paltry wealth, among the hardest hit by the financial collapse were low-income communities of color. “The median net worth for people of color fell 53 percent during the Great Recession [but] for whites fell only 16 percent,” CPD reports. But today the leading Big Banks have ironically “emerged stronger and more consolidated, rather than being fundamentally restructured.”
Jessica Valenti: Dealing with trolls will make young women sympathetic to Hillary Clinton
When I visit college campuses, young women always ask me how I deal with negativity online – and how they can. How can I write and participate on social media when it inevitably results in ad hominem attacks and vitriol? The students I speak to increasingly feel like they have to consider, before choosing a career path or posting an opinion in a public forum, whether they can cope with violently sexist responses and a never-ending barrage of misogynistic bullshit.
If anyone knows the answer to their questions, it’s Hillary Clinton. Her career has long epitomized how misogyny can haunts female politicians: the Hillary “nutcracker”, the pokes about her headbands, her hair, her pantsuits, her voice. She has too often been the target of insults based on men’s fear about powerful women – an unenviable position that few can understand. [..]
Clearly there is more to winning over young female voters than commiserating over sexist awfulness and advice on overcoming misogyny. But I’m betting there’s a deep-seated desire in a lot of young women to see sexist tormentors get theirs. Maybe they can’t stop the guy who tweets fat jokes at them, and maybe they’re too embarrassed to report the anonymous sexual threats in their Facebook messages. But what they can do is give a big “fuck you” to every get-back-in-the-kitchen YouTube bottom-dweller or cable news host jerk who mocks Clinton’s appearance by making their distaste known at the voting booth.
Then we’ll see who is making the sammiches. I’ll take an Italian sub.
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