“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 Reich: Why the Sharing Economy Is Harming Workers — and What Must Be Done
In this holiday season it’s especially appropriate to acknowledge how many Americans don’t have steady work.
The so-called “share economy” includes independent contractors, temporary workers, the self-employed, part-timers, freelancers, and free agents. Most file 1099s rather than W2s, for tax purposes. [..]
This trend shifts all economic risks onto workers. A downturn in demand, or sudden change in consumer needs, or a personal injury or sickness, can make it impossible to pay the bills.
It eliminates labor protections such as the minimum wage, worker safety, family and medical leave, and overtime.
And it ends employer-financed insurance — Social Security, workers’ compensation, unemployment benefits, and employer-provided health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
No wonder, according to polls, almost a quarter of American workers worry they won’t be earning enough in the future. That’s up from 15 percent a decade ago.
Steven Singer: Hypocrisy: Democrats Criticize Trump but Not a Peep Against Emanuel
So Donald Trump is a narcissistic, bigoted, fascist.
Not exactly a surprise.
He’s also the Republican front runner for President. I’ll admit to being mildly shocked by that.
However, much more astonishing are the chauvinistic and possibly illegal actions of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel – and the fact that no major Democrat of note is calling him out for any of it.
Let’s review. [..]
Predictably Democrats have decried this state of affairs. They have pointed their fingers accusingly at a Republican base that would champion such an odious figure for leader of the free world. And rightly so!
By contrast, Emanuel isn’t currently a candidate for anything. He’s a second term Democratic Mayor of one of the most populous cities in the country.
During that time, he has closed 50 public schools – 46 of which serve mostly black students. Southside residents had to resort to a month-long hunger strike to keep their last neighborhood school open. In addition, his economic policy consists of closing public health clinics for the poor and installing red light cameras to increase fines – none of which has actually boosted the economy.
But perhaps worse than all of that is the recent revelation that Emanuel’s administration with full knowledge of the Mayor may have actually covered up the police killing of an unarmed black teen!
Dana E. Abizaid: “Sorry we killed your family”: We are the terrorists in the Middle East, and our compliant media will never tell the truth
As the great American lawyer and statesman John Adams noted, “facts are stubborn things.”
Anybody paying attention to the facts regarding the U.S. bombing of a Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan on Oct. 3 could come to the conclusion that the attack was not a “mistake” but a targeted strike. To come to this conclusion one would have to abandon the belief that U.S. intentions are always benevolent and tragedies like Kunduz are simply “accidents” that happen in the fog of war. More importantly, such a conclusion would require one to put two words back to back that the mainstream U.S. press would find ludicrous: Western terrorism. It is unlikely that the U.S. media would ever consider such journalistic blasphemy.
But should it? Even a brief examination of the historical record over the past 16 years reveals a number of glaring “mistakes” in America’s bombing and strafing campaigns. Nevertheless, these attacks have been filed away in the dustbin of History after the U.S. government and media made clear that they were “mistakes.” But could they all be mistakes?
Monica Bauer: Right to Life
Another terrorist on the loose, another mass shooting. Seemingly another religious extremist who thinks he knows what God wants done, and picks up a gun to do it. Only this time, it’s an American and the religious extremist is most likely a right-wing Christian. And the shooter had help. He had help from an entire movement that has carelessly labeled abortion as “murder” and “baby-killing.” Killing abortion providers flows logically from the moment you call abortion “murder” and this labeling has to stop. Now. [..]
Words matter. Words have consequences. So I call on everyone in the anti-abortion movement to change their rhetoric going forward. Call it a sin, if you see it as such! Call down your God’s wrath in prayer against those who have abortions and those who provide them. But stop calling abortion murder, stop calling 12-week-old fetuses the size of a finger “babies,” stop lying about how many abortions are performed on fetuses that are near to term, stop showing pictures of fully formed babies on your billboards. Just stop. Because every time you portray abortion as murder, you are throwing gas on a fire. When the violence erupts, it may be one lone gunman pulling the trigger, but it’s an entire country full of anti-choice activists who are offering him ammunition.
Nick Tabor: Let Them In
After this month’s attacks in Paris, it didn’t take French authorities long to determine that the suicide bomber whose body was found outside a soccer stadium had only posed as a Syrian refugee in order to get into Europe. The numbers on his Syrian passport weren’t legitimate, and the picture on it didn’t match the name. We don’t know who he was or where his travels started; we only know that he sailed through a police checkpoint in Greece, and that he was not a Syrian refugee.
As for the rest of the attackers, a top European Union official said last week that they’d all been identified as EU citizens — mostly French and Belgian nationals — meaning they could have entered the US without even obtaining visas.
But none of these revelations have slowed the fetid stream of nativism and Islamophobia from reaching the United States. [..]
The fulcrum of the stricter screening argument is the claim that there’s no way of verifying anything the refugees say about themselves. “The problem is we can’t background check them,” Sen. Marco Rubio told ABC last week. “You can’t pick up the phone and call Syria.”
But this assertion is simply false. Rubio and his ilk are drawing on a popular mental image of Syria as a primitive country, a desert full of hut-dwellers with almost no technology or modern record-keeping.
Yet a senior State Department official, addressing these claims last week, called the Syrians a “very, very heavily documented population,” adding that they can typically show passports and family registries. And Kathleen Newland, a cofounder of the Migration Policy Institute, told the Atlantic that a police state, a “well-organized society” like Syria, would be more likely to have documentation than poorer countries where most citizens lack government-issued birth certificates or passports.
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