“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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David Cay Johnson: Baltimore riots speak the language of the dispossessed
Upheaval will end when political classes listen to more than just the rich
Monday’s riots in Baltimore offered a powerful warning about what lies ahead for America if its epidemic of inequality continues. But will we understand the message in the chaos?
“A riot is the language of the unheard,” the Rev. Martin Luther King said. What gets lost in translation is the logic that motivates rioters, whose inability to articulate their frustration finds expression in rocks thrown at police, looting neighborhood stores and setting fires. To outside observers, these actions appear irrational and self-defeating.
But their rhetoric is as old as civilization. Riots are a way for the oppressed to make their frustration known in the vain hope that those in power will respond with better policies.
Alex S. Vitale: Don’t count on Loretta Lynch to tame the police
New attorney general and the Justice Department she inherits have poor track records on law enforcement reform
More than five months after her nomination, Loretta Lynch has finally been confirmed as attorney general of the United States. No sooner did she assume office than Baltimore exploded into a level of civil unrest not seen there since 1968. Charm City is the latest symptom of a profound crisis of law enforcement that began with the killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown last summer and continues as high profile police killings of unarmed black men occur almost every week. This crisis is one of the biggest issues facing Lynch, but unfortunately the record of the Department of Justice (DOJ) on police reform is discouraging. [..]
Unfortunately, nothing in Lynch’s past suggests that she will undertake structural reform. As U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, she was involved in only one case of police misconduct, the brutal 1997 beating and sexual assault of Abner Louima. While her team won a conviction, Louima’s lawyer accused her of failing to bring charges in other clear cases of abuse. Others charged her with ignoring broader patterns of misconduct that might have implicated the NYPD’s street crimes unit – the plainclothes anti-crime unit involved in the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo – and then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
Lynch has continually stressed that minority communities need to place more trust in police. According to her aides, she sees improving police morale as one of her top priorities. Unlike Holder, she has been a forceful participant in the war on drugs and opposes exploring changes in federal marijuana law. The Justice Department has never been an ideal institution for taming the police, but under Lynch the fight for reform may become even more difficult.
Federal agencies say encryption will doom us, but they’re already using spy tools that circumvent it
For months, the FBI, the National Security Agency and an alphabet soup of other spooky agencies have been lashing out at tech companies that have responded to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s surveillance revelations by starting to protect customers with stronger encryption. But it’s increasingly obvious that the government’s crypto panic is powered by fear, not facts. [..]
The reason the FBI, Homeland Security and other agencies want us to imagine these frightening scenarios is that their encryption problem is just that: imaginary. It’s built on the false premise that making encryption more accessible will allow criminals to shield themselves from the law. The only solution, the government says, is for companies to put backdoors into their devices and apps, which by definition means installing defects that make our data more vulnerable to criminals and spies.
One need look only at what law enforcement agencies are doing in secret to see that these predictions of digital anarchy are pure fantasy.
Michele Goodwin: Watch Out, Joe Camel Is Back: Big Tobacco and the TPP
The Obama administration is poised to finalize the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. If Congress passes the current trade promotion authority bill, the TPP will become subject to a simple up or down vote, without possibility for any amendment. The Obama administration refuses to tell the public what’s in the agreement and Congress seems pressed to accept provisions that many Americans might deplore. This is a problem. Consider the TPP’s secretive advocacy for big tobacco.
The U.S. government is supporting big tobacco companies by negotiating dozens of international trade and investment agreements, but largely without the public’s knowledge. Historically, the U.S. has supported big tobacco to expand their profitability abroad, despite known health risks. For example, dating back to the 1990s the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that US tobacco trade surpluses doubled after “the U.S. government provided assistance in removing [trade] barriers.” The GAO report also notes how the prevalence of smoking in “Taiwan and South Korea had increased since the removal of U.S. cigarette export barriers,” which resulted in “the opening of Asian cigarette markets, [and increased] cigarette advertising…”
Robert L. Borosage: Hillary: Time to Step Up on the Trade Deal
It’s time for Hillary Clinton to take a position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement and the fast track authority designed to ramrod it through the Congress. Hillary has been non-committal to date, with many assuming she will eventually support the president whom she served as Secretary of State.
But now the pressure to take a stand is growing. President Obama decided to call out his opponents, turning the escalating battle over fast track and TPP into an intra-party back-alley knife fight. AFLCIO President Rich Trumka, head of the 11 million member labor federation, delivered a speech making it clear that labor consider the vote on fast track and TPP fundamental. A leader of the opposition in the Congress, populist stalwart Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont just announced he would challenge Hillary for the nomination. Fast track has already passed the Senate Finance Committee. The debate on the floor will begin in May. It is time for Hillary to choose.
Most people assume, of course, that Hillary will support the treaty rather than break with the president whom she served. But, if she adheres to the standards that she put forth for the agreement, she might well surprise observers by joining the opposition.
Katha Pollitt: Charlie Hebdo’ Deserves Its Award for Courage in Free Expression. Here’s Why.
When PEN decided to award the first PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, they surely thought they were honoring bravery in defense of free speech. This was a magazine that kept publishing after its offices were firebombed by Islamists in 2011, and kept publishing after nine staffers were horribly murdered by Islamists in January. Compare that to, say, Yale University Press, which dropped the illustrations for Jytte Clausen’s book about the Danish Mohammed cartoons after the book’s first printing, or Random House, which canceled publication of Sherry Jones’s The Jewel of Medina, a historical novel about Mohammed’s wife Aisha. Both publishing houses cited fears of violence by Muslim extremists. Those fears were not irrational. The head of the British publishing house that picked up Jones’s novel had his house firebombed-and the book was dropped. Violence works. [..]
The six writers are circulating a letter to PEN members, which many great and famous writers are signing: Joyce Carol Oates, Junot Diaz, Lorrie Moore. It seems to me these writers must be awfully sure that they will never fall afoul of either fanaticism or well-meaning liberalism. “There is a critical difference between staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable,” it argues, “and enthusiastically rewarding such expression.” Well, sure, but excuse me: violates the acceptable? The acceptable what? And don’t we need writing and artwork that pushes the boundary of what the acceptable is? “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” as Blake put it.
Norman Mailer, former president of PEN, had all sorts of reprehensible, ignorant and pigheaded views. When it came to politics, he was like a drunken uncle banging the table at Thanksgiving. But he pushed the boundaries back for every writer. And much as I dislike the vast bulk of his writing and his repulsive ideas about women-talk about punching down-if PEN gave him an award, I would just live with it.
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