“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 Creamer: Koch-Tied Group Asks High Court for Radical New Limits on Worker’s Rights to Negotiate for Higher Wages
Today, Monday, January 11, will have a big impact on the American Middle Class and all of those who aspire to it.
Today, the United States Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association.
This case has been brought to the Court by the Koch-sponsored “Center for Individual Rights (CIR) ” — an outfit that made its reputation challenging civil rights laws. The CIR is asking the Court to break with forty years of precedent to impose radical new limits on the rights of workers to negotiate together for higher wages and better working conditions.
Four decades ago, the Supreme Court ruled — unanimously — that since public sector unions must represent all of the employees in a bargaining unit, labor agreements can require all employees that benefit from that representation to pay a fair share contribution to support the costs of negotiating and servicing the labor agreement.
This does not mean that all employees are required to join a union and contribute to its lobbying and political work — or to anything else it might do that is not directly related to negotiating and enforcing the terms of a contract.
And recall that public sector unions represent only groups of workers that have voted to form — or join — a union to represent them.
Paul Krugman: The Obama Boom
Do you remember the “Bush boom”? Probably not. Anyway, the administration of George W. Bush began its tenure with a recession, followed by an extended “jobless recovery.” By the summer of 2003, however, the economy began adding jobs again. The pace of job creation wasn’t anything special by historical standards, but conservatives insisted that the job gains after that trough represented a huge triumph, a vindication of the Bush tax cuts.
So what should we say about the Obama job record? Private-sector employment — the relevant number, as I’ll explain in a minute — hit its low point in February 2010. Since then we’ve gained 14 million jobs, a figure that startled even me, roughly double the number of jobs added during the supposed Bush boom before it turned into the Great Recession. If that was a boom, this expansion, capped by last month’s really good report, outbooms it by a wide margin.
Mary Turck: It is time to abolish the grand jury system
On Jan. 6, a Texas grand jury indicted the state trooper who arrested Sandra Bland last July for perjury in filing his arrest report but not for his treatment of Bland. The Chicago-area woman was pulled over for not signaling a lane change and later found dead in her jail cell. In December, the grand jury declined to hold anyone responsible for Bland’s death.
The decisions bookend an Ohio grand jury’s refusal to indict the police officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in a Cleveland park. Grand juries indict in almost every case they consider — except for cases against police officers. It is time to abolish the jury system that time and again lets killer cops walk free.
Police in the United States kill far more people than those in most other countries. And the killings, non-lethal shootings, beatings and other abuses by law enforcement disproportionately target blacks and Native Americans. Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice: the litany of names goes on and on, some nationally known and others remembered only by their families or communities. Even as members of the Black Lives Matter movement protested the grand jury failures in Texas and Ohio, Chicago police shot and killed Quintonio LeGrier, an emotionally disturbed 19-year-old college student home for holiday break, and Bettie Jones, his neighbor and a 55-year-old mother of five.
Leo W. Gerard: GOP Vows Sickness and Ill-Health
The grandest and most majestic first act of 2016 by the Republican majority in Congress was to take a meat clever and sever 17 million Americans from their Affordable Care Act health insurance.
No chemo for you, cancer patients, the GOP declared. No plaster or slings for you, bone fracture victims, they sneered.
Precious few of the 17 million Americans whose health the GOP imperiled with this hard-hearted deed heard any panicked news about it, however. This made Republicans very, very sad because last week’s measure was the first in their 50 attempts to gut the Affordable Care Act to actually pass both the U.S. House and Senate. All of their other failed attempts had died in Congress. But this one, this one special bill, died Friday at the tip of President Obama’s veto pen. Still, it’s just as dead as the others. The bad, old insurance days won’t return.
Robert Kuttner: Where Economic Distress Meets Political Dysfunction
The economy generated almost 300,000 jobs last year and cut the nominal unemployment rate to five percent. But family incomes for most people are still deeply depressed.
Yet a lot of experts seem to think this is the best the economy can do. The Federal Reserve last month actually voted to raise interest rates on the premise that growth would soon pick up, and inflation might be a threat.
Meanwhile, slowing growth has made fools of the Fed’s experts. The collapsing stock market in China produced reverberations around the world and projections of slower growth at home and abroad.
The U.S. economy is relatively strong compared to the rest of the world (faint praise). But as the deep slide in domestic stock markets during the first week of the New Year suggests, we are hardly immune to global trends.
Lauren Carasik: Obama must halt raids on Central American refugee families
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has launched aggressive raids on family homes targeting asylum seekers from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras who received final orders of removal. At least 121 people, including children, have been detained since the New Year’s weekend in the first large-scale deportations of refugees from Central America’s troubled Northern Triangle. The nationwide raids are sending waves of fear in an already vulnerable and terrorized population, many of whom suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression.
The targeted roundups follow a surge in the number of migrants crossing the Southwest border in recent months. At least 10,000 unaccompanied children from Central America migrated across the border in October and November alone. But deporting women and children fleeing mayhem and misery back to the perilous conditions they fled is misguided and inhumane. Most are refugees trying to escape horrific levels of gang and gender-related violence and are entitled to humanitarian protection, yet little is being done to protect their rights.
The Barack Obama administration’s unrelenting efforts to turn refugees back have not deterred their inflow. More women and children are expected to flee in 2016 because they continue to be imperiled at home. Instead of cracking down on families, the U.S. should honor its domestic and international obligations to protect their rights, and re-orient its policies toward ameliorating the deplorable conditions in the Northern Triangle.
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