Tag: Punting the Pundits

In the 1980s, as a field French doctor working in Afghanistan, I wrote several articles and open letters to the Soviet Union president to avoid the destruction of the Médecins Sans Frontières Wardak hospital. Of course, the Russian planes bombarded it as an answer.

Targeting a red cross drawn on the roof of a hospital is an unacceptable, cowardly and sadly too-frequent accident. And in Kunduz, last week, a line has again been crossed.[..]

The world demands answers. Who were they targeting and why? Under which military orders? This deliberate killing is not acceptable. What took place is a violation of basic human rights. It was committed against humanitarian and international law, in complete contradiction of the Geneva conventions.

It’s a war crime.

Leo W. Gerard: TPP: Foie Gras for Corporations; Dead Rats for Workers

Some terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the 12-nation trade proposal completed last week, are so repulsive that the New Zealand trade minister who helped negotiate the scheme described accepting them as swallowing dead rats.

Here’s what New Zealand Minister Tim Groser said: “On the hardest core issues, there are some ugly compromises out there. And when we say ugly, we mean ugly from each perspective – it doesn’t mean ‘I’ve got to swallow a dead rat and you’re swallowing foie gras.’ It means both of us are swallowing dead rats on three or four issues to get this deal across the line.”

There’s no reason for the United States to swallow a trade deal filled with rotten rodent terms. Previous so-called free trade deals have killed American factories and hundreds of thousands of family-supporting manufacturing jobs. Based on that terrible experience, American workers know for sure that if the scheme contains any foie gras, it’ll be served on silver platters to corporations while workers are force-fed rats.

Eric Kasum: Columbus Day? True Legacy: Cruelty and Slavery

Once again, it’s time to celebrate Columbus Day. Yet, the stunning truth is: If Christopher Columbus were alive today, he would be put on trial for crimes against humanity. Columbus’ reign of terror, as documented by noted historians, was so bloody, his legacy so unspeakably cruel, that Columbus makes a modern villain like Saddam Hussein look like a pale codfish.

Question: Why do we honor a man who, if he were alive today, would almost certainly be sitting on Death Row awaiting execution?

If you’d like to know the true story about Christopher Columbus, please read on. But I warn you, it’s not for the faint of heart.

Here’s the basics. On the second Monday in October each year, we celebrate Columbus Day (this year, it’s on October 11th). We teach our school kids a cute little song that goes: “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” It’s an American tradition, as American as pizza pie. Or is it? Surprisingly, the true story of Christopher Columbus has very little in common with the myth we all learned in school.

Zach Stafford: Respectability politics won’t save the lives of black Americans

In the wake of Michael Brown, many black Americas still secretly believed and clung to the idea that respectability politics, or the idea that if we ‘act right’ we will be just fine, were actually a viable way to stay alive. In the past few years, we have been reminded that being respectable will not save our lives. [..]

The reason why being ‘respectable’ doesn’t work is because no matter how respectable you may be acting, your performance isn’t undoing the very real systematic ways in which our world operates.

Wearing a tie doesn’t rectify the fact that black people are incarcerated at six times that rate of white people. You having the ‘right job’ doesn’t give a black person a job as the community faces an unemployment rate of twice that of white people. And saying #AllLivesMatters doesn’t take the bullet out of the literally countless black bodies shot dead by police officers.

Instead, believing that our lives only matter when we ‘act right’ only fuels the very dangerous ways in which our world operates. It protects the structural racism that no one ever wants to talk about or challenge. And it inevitably makes you believe that your life depends on a well enunciated “yes, sir.”

Giant Wall Street banks continue to threaten the wellbeing of millions of Americans, but what to do?

Bernie Sanders says break them up and resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act that once separated investment from commercial banking.

Hillary Clinton says charge them a bit more and oversee them more carefully.

Most Republicans say don’t worry.

Clearly, there’s reason to worry. Back in 2000, before they almost ruined the economy and had to be bailed out, the five biggest banks on Wall Street held 25 percent of the nation’s banking assets. Now they hold more than 45 percent.

Their huge size fuels further growth because they’ll be bailed out if they get into trouble again.

This hidden federal guarantee against failure is estimated be worth over $80 billion a year to the big banks. In effect, it’s a subsidy from the rest of us to the bankers.

And they’ll almost certainly get into trouble again if nothing dramatic is done to stop them. Consider their behavior since they were bailed out.

Eugene Robinson: Chaos Is the GOP’s New Normal

At this point, I worry we’re going to start finding members of the Republican establishment curled up in their beds, eyes clenched shut and ears covered with trembling hands, moaning “make it stop, make it stop, make it stop.”

Pity their suffering, but remember that they brought it on themselves.

The insurrection that propelled billionaire Donald Trump into the lead for the GOP nomination and ultimately made House Speaker John Boehner surrender his gavel in frustration rages on unabated. This was no mere summer skirmish. If anything, the rebellion is gaining strength. [..]

n the Democratic Party, the conflict is ideological-left vs. center-left. In the GOP, the struggle looks existential.

Put another way, it’s not hard to imagine a party in which there’s room for both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and you can easily imagine one supporting the other as standard-bearer. But a tent that can hold, say, both Trump’s view on undocumented immigrants-hunt them down and kick them out-and Bush’s support for compassionate reform? That’s not a political party, it’s a food fight.

The Republican establishment may ultimately find some way to drag one of its presidential candidates through the primaries. But chaos, Trump has shown, is the GOP’s new normal.

Joan Walsh: Boehner and McCarthy Reap What They Sowed

The chaotic House GOP leadership battle-if it can be called a battle, when virtually no one wants to be leader-is normally blamed on fractious right-wing extremists in the so-called “Freedom Caucus.” But when House Speaker John Boehner and his would-have-been successor Kevin McCarthy wonder who’s to blame for their troubles, they should start by looking in the mirror.

Since Boehner came to power in 2011, his leadership team has encouraged the far right in its crusade against government, governing, and compromise. They’ve fostered the extremists’ delusions that they can do things they simply can’t, with a Democrat in the White House-repeal Obamacare, defund Planned Parenthood, hold the debt ceiling hostage to force huge budget cuts.

Boehner and McCarthy (and before him Eric Cantor, who was defeated by a far-right primary challenger last year) can do the math: time and again they turned to Democrats to pass measures to keep the government open and avoid disaster, but only after they tried and failed to mollify the far right. This only encouraged the “Freedom Caucus” members in their delusions of power-and enraged them that they were being kept from wielding it.

Michelle Chen: Is DC About to Pass the Best Sick Leave in the Country?

For most Americans, a sick day is a workday. If you want to get paid, you don’t stay home. Not even when you or your child are ill, not even if you just gave birth.

Most private sector workers in the US have no paid medical leave benefits; just 12 percent have employer-sponsored paid family leave. Most low-wage workers risk income or losing their job if they take a single sick day. But in the nation’s capital, workers might soon be able to take four months for medical care. A new proposal in the DC city council would offer 16 weeks of paid medical leave-the strongest such policy in the country, according to Council Members David Grosso and Elissa Silverman, who introduced the bill this week.

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Many politicians held their nose and voted for the USA Freedom Act in June, hoping that the Snowden revelations would recede into the distance with the modest NSA reform bill’s passage. How wrong they were: the Snowden effect continues to ripple throughout the world on matters of privacy and law and it’s possible this second wave is only beginning.

On Tuesday, in a landmark decision, the European Court of Justice invalidated the “safe harbor” provision between the United States and Europe that allowed large tech companies like Google and Facebook to move large amounts of private Europeans’ data into servers in the United States. The case was brought by privacy activist and lawyer Max Schrems after the initial stories about the NSA’s Prism program. As the New York Times reported, the court “made it clear that American intelligence agencies had almost unfettered access to the data, infringing on Europeans’ rights to privacy.”

Benjamin Spoer: We need a public health approach to gun violence

It worked for automobiles and tobacco; it can work for guns

In his address to the nation after the Oct. 1 mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, President Barack Obama asked the media to compare the number of gun deaths in the U.S. to the number of deaths caused by terrorism. While edifying, his comparison didn’t go far enough. Each year guns kill more Americans (including deaths by suicide) than Parkinson’s disease and hypertension, and they kill nearly as many as liver disease and cirrhosis, which would rank guns as the 13th leading cause of death nationwide. Even more disturbing, researchers believe mass shootings, like the one in Roseburg, are contagious, and many in the media have begun to refer to an epidemic of mass shootings.

Gun violence is a public health crisis. Consequently, it’s time to address these shootings and gun violence as a whole using public health tools. The best tool we have is to reduce the number of people exposed to gun violence, and the best example of how to do that comes from the automobile safety movement of the 1960s.

Susan Watson: Alabama’s DMV Shutdown Has Everything to Do With Race

Don’t believe a word of it: It’s all about race.

Despite state officials’ quick denial that the closing of 31 Alabama DMVs has nothing to do with race, it is a fact that the closures – mostly in poor, majority black counties – disproportionately hurts Black voters. Period.

Fifty years ago in Selma, the civil rights movement won a hard fought battle to gain the right to register to vote. It took bloodshed in the streets, lives lost, a march to Montgomery, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act to make sure that African-American citizens had the right to vote. It was all about race.

Unfortunately, some things in Alabama never change. When it comes to making sure people can vote, the state of Alabama has on its hands an avoidable problem. Our legislature passed an unnecessary law that put excessive burdens on citizens by requiring them to get a photo ID in order to exercise their fundamental constitutional right to vote – despite the well-known fact that in-person voter fraud is rare.

Janet Redman: Walking the Talk? World Bank Rhetoric on Climate Undermined by Financing It

At least in rhetoric, World Bank leadership has acknowledged for a quarter century that “the possible risks [of global warming] are too high to justify complacency or evasion.” The Bank itself has cautioned that unabated climate change threatens to reverse hard-earned development gains – and that the poorest countries and communities will suffer the consequences first and worst. The Bank has become increasingly visible at global climate summits and officials regularly comment on the need for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, protecting the climate and making a transition to low-carbon development. However, a sober review of its lending practices reveals the Bank is undermining the cause it purports to champion.

We compared World Bank energy sector financing through the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and International Development Assistance (IDA) for two five-year time periods: 2000 to 2004 and 2010 to 2014.

Air power inflicts horrific human-rights violations and has been thoroughly discredited as a means of fighting insurgencies

The aerial destruction that rained down on a hospital complex run by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz, a provincial capital in northeast Afghanistan, on October 3 puts an exclamation point on the story of America’s 14 years of warfare in that Central Asian country. At least 22 people were killed, among them doctors, other medical personnel, and patients, including three children, and dozens were wounded in the attack.

Beyond the obvious, immediate implications of this massacre-which serves as a reminder that for all of those 14 years, the United States has engaged in a brutal, mismanaged and ill-conceived war-more broadly the ruins of the Kunduz hospital are a symbol of America’s unfortunate reliance on air power, including drone strikes and bombers, to combat a host of insurgent groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and elsewhere in Africa.

E. J. Dionne: Let’s Focus on the Gun-Makers

It’s not just Congress that fails to respond after another massacre briefly focuses attention on the irrationality and permissiveness of our country’s firearms statutes. Those of us seeking change also regularly fall down on the job. We express outrage and move on, leaving the debate exactly where we found it.

Opponents of the big gun interests are often insufficiently innovative in what we propose. Let’s face it: We have been losing this fight. [..]

The time has come to recast this battle as a fight to hold those who make billions of dollars from the sale of firearms accountable for what their products do to individuals and communities. We must call for corporate responsibility, and enforce it by law if it’s not forthcoming. And President Obama, whose outrage about guns many of us share, must be willing to go well beyond what he has done so far.

As is their way, the community organizers and activists at the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) are pushing the president to use the federal government’s purchasing power to promote safer guns. To do business with the government, companies would have to be willing to “remove the barriers to getting smart guns and gun safety technologies to market” and cooperate with law enforcement to “identify and isolate dealers that provide large numbers of guns used in crimes.”

John Nichols: TPP Prioritizes ‘Rights’ of Corporations Over Workers, the Environment and Democracy

The way to begin any discussion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership is with a simple question:

Where does this sweeping global trade deal rest power-with the people and their elected representatives in the United States and eleven other Pacific-rim countries, or with the multinational corporations that have been empowered by every previous trade deal of this kind?

The answer, if history is any indication, and if reports on the the secretive agreement are accurate, is that the power will rest with the corporations.

“The deal announced [Monday] is the result of negotiations between corporate interests and trade representatives, which ignored the voices of working families in all twelve countries,” announced Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairs Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ) and Keith Ellison (D-MN). “While details are still emerging, we are concerned the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will destroy jobs and depress wages, threaten health and safety standards, harm our air, land and water, and make it harder for patients to access life-saving drugs.”

Headlines foster stereotypes, suggest facile solutions

On Oct. 1, a gunman killed nine people and wounded 20 others at Umpqua Community College in southwestern Oregon. Headlines about the massacre have trumpeted mental illness as the cause. “Madman kills nine” led The New York Daily News. Fox News followed with “Issue of mental health part of national discourse again following Oregon college shooting.” “The CBS Evening News” featured “Mass shootings and the mental health connection.”

This is both the wrong explanation and a too-quick conclusion about the tragedy that contributes to the stigmatization of people with mental illness. Mental Illness Awareness Week (Oct. 4 through 10) offers an opportunity to step back and take a closer look at what mental illness is, how stigma makes it worse and what resources need to be marshaled to help those who have a mental illness.

Amy B. Dean: Labor rights by executive decree

With Congress gridlocked, President Obama must follow states’ leads to help working Americans

This summer, 1 million working people in Massachusetts won paid sick leave. This remarkable advance was the result of a 2014 referendum, which passed with the support of 60 percent of voters. It granted workers one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked. With that vote, the Bay State became the third in the nation – after California and Connecticut – to extend such protections to its citizens.

In September, President Barack Obama went to Boston to announce a new regulation for federal government contractors, which will be required to offer their workers paid sick time as well. The federal standard will grant seven days of paid medical leave per year. The White House estimated that the executive order will benefit 300,000 people when it goes into effect in 2017. [..]

This summer, 1 million working people in Massachusetts won paid sick leave. This remarkable advance was the result of a 2014 referendum, which passed with the support of 60 percent of voters. It granted workers one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked. With that vote, the Bay State became the third in the nation – after California and Connecticut – to extend such protections to its citizens.

In September, President Barack Obama went to Boston to announce a new regulation for federal government contractors, which will be required to offer their workers paid sick time as well. The federal standard will grant seven days of paid medical leave per year. The White House estimated that the executive order will benefit 300,000 people when it goes into effect in 2017.

Martha Plimpton: Those who decry abortion but condone gun violence are anti-woman, not pro-life

Another gunman opened fire on a classroom last Thursday, this time at Umpqua Community College in my mother’s hometown of Roseburg, Oregon. Nine people were killed and nine others seriously injured. It was the 294th mass shooting in our country in 274 days.

The same day as the massacre in Oregon, North Carolina’s law imposing a 72-hour waiting period to have an abortion went into effect. North Carolina is now tied with Missouri as having the longest waiting period for women seeking to exercise their constitutional right to abortion.

What do these three things have in common? What possible corollary could I be drawing between such seemingly disparate events? The short answer is: North Carolina doesn’t have a waiting period to buy a gun.

Penny Okamoto: Guns kill people in the US because we pervert the Second Amendment

America’s gun violence, like our grief in Oregon, seems to know no bounds, no limits, no end. The reason is deadly simple: our very lives are chained to a constitutional amendment that is willfully misinterpreted by many and perverted by gun rights advocates for political ends.

That sullied amendment is the United States constitution’s Second Amendment which states, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The gun industry and its supporters have turned that simple statement into a clever marketing tool, and Americans are paying the price in blood.

Last week, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump released his plan for changing the tax code. Trump wants big across the board tax cuts, with the largest tax cuts going to the wealthy. He claimed that his tax cut won’t lead to a loss of revenue since it would lead to a huge spurt of economic growth. His number was 6.0 percent annual growth over the next decade, topping Jeb Bush’s 4.0 percent growth rate by two full percentage points. [..]

But apart from what the tax cuts may or may not be able to do in terms of growth, there is also the matter of how the Federal Reserve Board would react. If that sounds strange, you should be very angry at the reporters at your favorite news outlet, because they should have been talking about this part of the picture.

Suppose that Donald Trump’s tax cut really is the magic elixir that would get the economy to grow 6.0 percent a year. But what if the people at the Fed’s Open Market Committee (FOMC) don’t recognize this fact? After all, many on the FOMC want to raise interest rates now because they think the economy’s current 2.0 percent growth rate is too fast.

David Dayen: We must despise our kids: Our ugly war on teachers must end now

Last week’s jobs report showed the labor market decelerating. This appears to be the fifth straight year that promising signs in the winter end up softening in the summer and fall. And indicators like the labor force participation rate (which is at a 38-year low) and wage growth (which has stagnated for decades, including in what should be a surge period since the Great Recession) make it look even worse.

But Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute dug out perhaps the worst numbers in the report. With September’s data in, we can see how many teachers went back to school this year. And Gould finds that the tremendous gap that opened up when local budgets crashed during the recession has not come close to being filled.

At the peak, we had 8.1 million public K-12 education teachers and staff in July 2008. Seven years later, we have far less, 7.8 million, despite a larger population of students that need to be served. According to EPI, the local public education shortfall, accounting for additional student enrollment, is 410,000 jobs.

This means that classrooms built for 25 or 30 students now have 35 or 40 in them. It means that kids don’t get the same level of personalized instruction, or in some cases any attention at all. It means that programs like art and music have to be excised, or extracurricular activities, simply because there are no resources available to staff them.

Mark Weisbrot: WikiLeaks cables shed light on US foreign policy failures

Documents show Washington backing of regime change is a major problem

Some the most important historical information for understanding current events comes, not surprisingly, from sources that were intended to be shielded from the public. From November 2010 to September 2011, more than 250,000 communications between U.S. diplomats that were never meant to see the light of day were made public. They are available at WikiLeaks, the nonprofit media organization that accepts confidential information from anonymous sources and releases it to news sources and the public. A number of researchers have put together a treasure trove of information and analysis that can be immensely clarifying. (The recently released book from this research, published by Verso, is “The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to U.S. Empire.”)

Consider Syria, which is dominating the international news because of increased Russian military intervention as well as a surge of some 500,000 refugees from the region arriving in Europe. Why has it taken so long for Washington to even begin – yes, it is unfortunately just beginning – to reconsider the policy of requiring Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to agree to resign before any meaningful negotiations can take place? After all, any diplomat could have told the White House that demanding the political suicide of one party to a civil war as a condition for negotiations is not how civil wars end. Practically speaking, this policy has been a commitment to indefinite warfare.