Tag: Punting the Pundits

Here’s how the U.S. can leverage its wealth, safety, and diplomacy to serve the refugees it helped to create.

The vision of hundreds of thousands of desperate human beings fleeing airstrikes, terror, and violence from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and beyond has brought the stark human cost of today’s “anti-terror” wars to the front pages. The heart-breaking photo of one small boy, still clad in a “red shirt, blue jeans, and little sneakers,” as a now-viral poem goes, washed up on the Turkish shore, has brought the horror of that stark reality into our hearts.

Indeed, the refugee crisis growing out of the multi-faceted Syrian war and others is now a full-blown global emergency. It’s not only an emergency because it’s now reaching Europe. It’s an emergency several years in the making as conditions have deteriorated throughout the Middle East and North Africa. In addition to Syria, refugees are also pouring into Europe – or dying as they try – from Libya, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Bangladesh, and beyond.

But it’s the war in Syria – now involving a host of regional, sectarian, and global actors all fighting their own wars to the last Syrian – that lies at the bloody center of the current crisis. And here the United States bears no small responsibility.

Jessica Valenti: Many shootings are not called by their proper name: domestic violence

A shooting this week in Mississippi – where a teacher at Delta State University allegedly shot and killed his live-in partner and another professor – has been called a shooting spree and a “love triangle”. What we haven’t really heard it called, however, is perhaps the most important descriptor: domestic violence.

Shannon Lamb, the alleged killer, is believed to have killed Amy Prentiss, the woman he lived with, and a colleague, professor Ethan Schmidt. Lamb was later found dead, apparently from a self-inflicted gun wound.

No matter what police eventually determine that the motive was, this is domestic violence. And until we start talking seriously about the intersection of gun violence and intimate partner violence, we will continue to watch as murders – many of them preventable – are perpetrated again and again.

Jess Zimmerman: What if the mega-rich just want rocket ships to escape the Earth they destroy?

The early capitalists once had to breathe the air that they polluted in pursuit of their wealth. Now, perhaps, they can escape it by leaving the planet

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is the latest tech billionaire to invest his money in spaceships: on Tuesday, he debuted his space travel company Blue Origin’s newest rocket. Now, those who want to cruise the galaxy can choose between the sleek new rocket and the stubbier model Bezos announced in April – or they can opt to ride with Tesla founder Elon Musk on a SpaceX ship, or hop on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.

At this rate, would-be space travelers will be able to choose their favorite tech company, find its richest guy and buy a ticket on his craft of choice. Why does everyone who achieves economic dominance over the planet immediately turn around and try to get off it?

Katie Halper: Are Colbert’s New Politics Softer, or Just More Subtle?

A political comedian reviews the first of the new Late Show.

It was a no-brainer that Stephen Colbert as The Late Show host would be less politically edgy or hard hitting than he was on The Colbert Report. After all, The Colbert Report was arguably the most relentlessly, fiercely political, and, dare I say, partisan (in a good way) television show ever. Because Colbert never broke character, nearly every sentence he uttered was a political statement in which he simultaneously mocked right-wing values, or lack thereof, and implicitly advanced his own humanism and progressive political orientation. As Colbert explained in his Late Show debut, “I used to play a narcissistic conservative pundit-now I’m just a narcissist.”

But it’s not just that he’s taken off the character mask. Colbert has gone from cable to a major network. Cable is always less restricting than network television, but on top of that, Comedy Central, a channel dedicated exclusively to, well, comedy, is especially irreverent. Strong political opinions aren’t as tolerated on network television, which is why NBC (the network) has MSNBC (the cable channel) and Fox (the network) has Fox News (the cable channel). (I’m in no way equating MSNBC and Fox News, by the way-Fox News is a lot further from the center and from the facts than its so-called liberal counterpart.)

So, given these limitations, how did Stephen Colbert as political critic fare this past week? As expected, the first week of the show revealed a more politically restrained Colbert, and even some clichéd bipartisan statements and gestures. But given the new context, he managed to keep the show’s politics fairly pointed. And maybe, just maybe, his more bipartisan tone will prove to be a strategic way for him to deliver his more politically daring messages. A girl can dream.

It’s going to get a lot harder to pretend that the suffering in Ferguson, Michael Brown’s death and the explosive reaction after his shooting weren’t all about race now that the Ferguson Commission has bluntly written: “make no mistake: this is about race.” [..]

The commission’s assessments about structural racism in and around St Louis are direct and to the point. The commission acknowledged its own limitations, writing: “we do not know for certain if these calls to action are the answer. We can’t”. They wrote that, historically, commissions after riots have focused on “economic revitalization ‘to the exclusion of social issues, such as racial tension, segregation and discrimination”; this whitewashed over racism in an expedient, cowardly way. Citing political scientist Lindsey Lupo, the Ferguson Commission scolds previous commissions for (emphasis added).

“Arguing that our society has moved beyond race, thus the problems must be purely economic. But race remains at the root of the violence, as evidenced by its very inception with every riot studied here being the result of white law enforcement harming a black civilian.”

Luis Gallardo: The burden of paying back Puerto Rico’s debt should not fall on the island’s poor

In the wake of Governor Alejandro García’s June declaration that the Puerto Rican government’s $72bn public debt is unpayable – putting an end to the traditional practice of financing the government’s massive annual deficits and rampant spending through loans – citizen and labor groups have taken to the streets concerned that the burden of paying off the debt will fall disproportionately on the island’s poor, working and middle class residents.

The release last week of the Fiscal and Economic Growth Plan, the product of a special working group commissioned by the government, has not allayed their concerns. Though some of the measures – such as the simplification of tax codes and investment in energy infrastructure – are a necessary condition of reform and recovery, large corporations and the wealthy will wind up almost unscathed by the proposals. On the other hand, those least able to afford to pay the consequences of years of profligate government spending will have to tighten their belts.

Martin O’Neill: The unexpected rise of Jeremy Corbyn

Victory rebukes Blair third-way politics and British austerity policies

On the morning of Sept. 12, Jeremy Corbyn took to the stage for his victory speech at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster dressed like Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Syriza. Wearing an open-neck shirt, a style favored by Europe’s new radical left, he addressed the crowd with a stark anti-austerity message.

“We don’t have to be unequal,” he said. “It does not have to be unfair. Poverty isn’t inevitable. Things can – and they will – change.”

This summer has seen an extraordinary transformation of the British Labour Party. This wave culminated in the party election of Corbyn, a veteran from its hard-left faction, as its new leader. Few outside Labour circles had even heard of the man even a few months ago.

While other European countries such as Spain and Greece have seen the rise of radical socialist alternatives to established parties of the center-left, in Britain the anti-austerity socialist surge has transformed Labour from the inside rather than displaced it. Nobody saw this coming, Corbyn included.

How did this happen? And what will be the consequences of Labour’s unexpected change of direction?

Alex Kane: It’s time for Israel to disarm

A nuke-free Israel will create a more stable Middle East

It’s September in New York: the start of a diplomatic marathon that will no doubt bring renewed attention to Israel’s nuclear weapons stockpile.

Since 1974, the United Nations General Assembly has passed a laudable Egyptian-sponsored resolution calling for the Middle East to become a nuclear weapons free zone each year. Starting five years later, the UN began repeatedly passing an Egyptian-authored resolution calling on Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, under which it would disarm and place its nuclear materials under international inspection. But these resolutions are nonbinding, and the leading Arab state’s calls to focus on Israel’s arsenal of at least 80 nuclear warheads are usually ignored by Western powers.

That reality is unlikely to change this year. But it should.

The July signing of the Iran nuclear accord is certain to produce political clashes at the UN. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won’t be able to resist railing against the deal in front of the world. But the expected focus on the Iranian nuclear program makes the UN General Assembly, which opens its 70th session on Tuesday, the perfect opportunity to probe another nuclear program in the Middle East – one that has actually produced a weapon, unlike Iran’s.

Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders spoke Saturday to a half-empty gymnasium at Benedict College in South Carolina. The school is historically black, but the crowd appeared to be largely white.

This underscores the severe challenge facing the Sanders campaign: African-American voters have yet to fully connect to the man and the message. [..]

South Carolina will be the first test. According to The New York Times, 55 percent of South Carolina Democratic primary voters were black in 2008. Yet current polls show Clinton with a massive lead over Sanders in the state. And those polls show Vice President Joe Biden leading Sanders, even though Biden has yet to announce whether he’ll run. That’s why it’s important not only for Sanders to spend more time in the state, but also to pick a venue like Benedict College.

Robert Kuttner: The Larger Meaning of Jeremy Corbyn

The victory of Jeremy Corbyn, an old-style unreconstructed lefty, to lead the supposedly modernized British Labour Party, is emblematic of trends afflicting all of Europe. Corbyn represents the same upsurge among the young and the dispossessed as Bernie Sanders does in the United States — a feeling] that the more progressive of the two major parties is just not delivering, and a demand for new leadership that rejects failed centrism.

Unfortunately for the Brits, Sanders is rather more presentable in his views than Corbyn. In the mainstream press, Corbyn has been ridiculed for saying admiring things about Hugo Chavez, wanting to pull Britain out of NATO, calling for broad scale nationalizations of industry and expressing pro-Palestinian views that, at times, seem to border on anti-Semitism. More on these questions in a moment.

But the election of Corbyn — love him or hate him — reflects something profound that is occurring all across Europe.

Scott Lemieux: Partisanship isn’t the enemy of reform – it’s a necessary condition of it

Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig has raised a million dollars and declared that he’s running for the Democratic nomination for president – and he claims to have invented a new strategy that would compel Congress to pass his agenda.

Lessig’s campaign is based on a simple promise – that his entire goal as president would be passing the “Citizens Equality Act,” a series of (attractive) electoral and campaign finance reforms. He has vowed to do nothing but focus on the act and then resign once it’s passed. Even if North Korean troops attempt to march into Seoul, a hurricane hits Miami and a US Supreme Court vacancy emerges, Lessig will retain a laser focus on his pet procedural reforms. By declaring the election a “referendum,” he asserts, even the Republicans who will almost certainly control the House of Representatives in 2016 will have no choice but to pass his proposed legislation.

He’s wrong. Both strategically and substantively, Lessig’s run reflects a lot of the common fallacies of people who think they’re too smart for politics.

Robert Reich: Ranking Colleges

After heavy lobbying from some of the nation’s most elite institutions of higher education, the President has just abandoned his effort to rank the nation’s 7,000 colleges and universities.

So, with college application season almost upon us, where should aspiring college students and their parents look for advice?

In my view, not U.S. News and World Report‘s annual college guide (out last week).

It’s analogous to a restaurant guide that gives top ratings to the most expensive establishments that are backed and frequented by the wealthiest gourmands — and much lower rankings to restaurants with the best food at lower prices that attract the widest range of diners. [..]

In an era when income and wealth are more concentrated at the top than in living memory — much of it in the hands of Wall Street bankers, corporate executives, and their retainers — U.S. News has become a major enabler of American inequality.

We need another guide for ranking colleges — one that doesn’t look at the fatness of alumni wallets or the amount spent on each student, but does take account of economic diversity and dedication to public service.

Fortunately, there is one. It’s a relatively new one, provided by the Washington Monthly.

My advice: Use it.

Just a few years after the financial crisis, a new report tells an important story: Federal prosecution of white-collar crime has hit a 20-year low.

The analysis by Syracuse University shows a more than 36 percent decline in such prosecutions since the middle of the Clinton administration, when the decline began. Landing amid calls from Democratic presidential candidates for more Wall Street prosecutions, the report notes that the projected number of prosecutions this year is 12 percent less than last year and 29 percent less than five years ago. [..]

Underscoring that assertion is a recent study by researchers at George Mason University tracking the increased use of special Justice Department agreements that allow corporations-and often their executives-to avoid being prosecuted. Before 2003, researchers found, the Justice Department offered almost no such deals. The researchers report that from 2007 to 2011, 44 percent of cases were resolved through the deals-known as deferred prosecution agreements and non-prosecution agreements.

In 2012, President Obama pledged to “hold Wall Street accountable” for financial misdeeds related to the financial crisis. But as financial industry donations flooded into Obama’s re-election campaign, his Justice Department officials promoted policies that critics say embodied a “too big to jail” doctrine for financial crime.

Thor Benson: Can Apple, Google and Facebook Save Us From Big Brother?

Apple has been battling the Department of Justice and the intelligence community for years now, as was amply illustrated recently. The DOJ obtained a court order to force the company to provide it with the texts of two criminal suspects, but Apple responded by saying the messages are automatically encrypted and it cannot access them.

The DOJ is not happy about this. FBI Director James Comey has often stated that message encryption helps terrorists and kidnappers stay undetected, despite the fact that no evidence of this has been provided.

Ryan Calo, an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law, published a piece on Fusion on Monday that explains part of his longer thesis on surveillance. He believes tech companies are playing-and could continue to play-a major role in ensuring the privacy of Americans and protecting them from unnecessary surveillance efforts. “Keep on top of Apple, Google, Microsoft. Follow what they do and don’t let them let up,” he writes. “They may be our best chance out of this surveillance mess.”

Ari Berman: Restoring the Voting Rights Act Now Has Bipartisan Support

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska becomes the first Republican to support ambitious legislation to restore the Voting Rights Act.

 On June 2015-the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision gutting the Voting Rights Act (VRA)-congressional Democrats introduced ambitious new legislation to restore the VRA. Last night, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska became the first Republican to cosponsor the bill, known as the Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2015. The bill compels states with a well-documented history of recent voting discrimination to clear future voting changes with the federal government, requires federal approval for voter ID laws, and outlaws new efforts to suppress the growing minority vote. [..]

Murkowski’s decision to support restoring the VRA stands in stark contrast to the hateful and inflammatory rhetoric espoused by Republican presidential candidates such as Donald Trump and reactionary efforts by the likes of Kim Davis to limit civil rights.

Her cosponsorship of the bill was influenced by her home state of Alaska, which since 1965 had to approve its voting changes with the federal government because of discrimination against Alaska Natives. Said Murkowski: “The question of whether Alaska Natives have fair access to the voting booth has been litigated multiple times over the past several years. Impediments to voting in many of our rural communities because of distance and language need to be addressed, and my hope is that this legislation will resolve these issues. Every Alaskan deserves a meaningful chance to vote.”

Zoë Carpenter: Republicans Hold a Planned Parenthood ‘Show Trial’ Based on Videos They Haven’t Seen

“Joseph McCarthy would be proud of this committee today,” said one Democrat.

 On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee held the first of several congressional hearings sparked by undercover videos purporting to show that Planned Parenthood profits from illegal sales of fetal tissue. Less than 40 minutes had elapsed by the time someone quoted Adolf Hitler. The hysteria lasted for nearly four hours, marked by claims that abortion providers start their day with a “shopping list” of body parts to procure, about a fetus’s face being cut open with scissors, about fetuses who “cried and screamed as they died” but weren’t heard “because it was amniotic fluid going over their vocal cords instead of air.”

The hearing was engineered to repulse and horrify; it was not designed to reveal any credible information about Planned Parenthood or the Center for Medical Progress, the antiabortion group that made and edited the undercover videos. Neither Planned Parenthood nor CMP were asked to make representatives available to testify. Instead, Republicans called on two “abortion survivors” who lived after their mothers attempted to terminate their pregnancies, and issued emotional appeals against abortion, broadly. They also invited James Bopp, the Indiana lawyer who argued on behalf of the nonprofit Citizens United in the Supreme Court case that extended 1st Amendment rights to corporations. Among other things, Bopp argued in his testimony that fetal tissue donation encourages women “to choose abortions as an acceptable form of birth control.” Priscilla Smith, who directs the Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice at Yale Law School, was the only witness who supported abortion rights.

Visitors to Japan are often surprised by how prosperous it seems. It doesn’t look like a deeply depressed economy. And that’s because it isn’t.

Unemployment is low; overall economic growth has been slow for decades, but that’s largely because it’s an aging country with ever fewer people in their prime working years. Measured relative to the number of working-age adults, Japanese growth over the past quarter century has been almost as fast as America’s, and better than Western Europe’s.

Yet Japan is still caught in an economic trap. Persistent deflation has created a society in which people hoard cash, making it hard for policy to respond when bad things happen, which is why the businesspeople I’ve been talking to here are terrified about the possible spillover from China’s troubles.

Greg Grandin: The TPP Will Finish What Chile’s Dictatorship Started

Salvador Allende warned against neoliberalism’s disastrous effects just before he was overthrown. He was right to be worried.

This September 11th will be the forty-second anniversary of the US-backed coup against the democratically-elected Chilean government, led by the Socialist Salvador Allende, kicking off a battle that is still being fought: in Chile, protests led by students, indigenous peoples, and workers to rollback the “neoliberalization,” or Pinochetization, of society, are a continuing part of everyday life.

Neoliberalism is hard to define. It could refer to intensified resource extraction, financialization, austerity, or something more ephemeral, a way of life, in which collective ideals of citizenship give out to marketized individualism and consumerism. [..]

In the 1970s, socialism was, for many, on the horizon of the possible, with the principle of “excess profit” seen as a way for exploited countries to, in Allende’s words, “correct historic wrongs.” Today, forget nationalization, much less socialism. If the TPP is ratified and ISDS put into effect, countries won’t be able to limit mining to protect their water supply or even enforce anti-tobacco regulation.

This September 11th, as the Obama administration makes its final push for the TPP, it’s worth taking a moment to realize why all those people in Chile-and in Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, and throughout Latin America-died and were tortured: to protect the “future profits” of multinational corporations.

Glenn Greenwald: Hillary Clinton Goes to Militaristic, Hawkish Think Tank, Gives Militaristic, Hawkish Speech

Leading Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Wednesday delivered a foreign policy speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington. By itself, the choice of the venue was revealing.

Brookings served as Ground Zero for centrist think tank advocacy of the Iraq War, which Clinton (along with potential rival Joe Biden) notoriously and vehemently advocated. Brookings’ two leading “scholar”-stars – Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon – spent all of 2002 and 2003 insisting that invading Iraq was wise and just, and spent the years after that assuring Americans that the “victorious” war and subsequent occupation were going really well (in April 2003, O’Hanlon debated with himself over whether the strategy that led to the “victory” in his beloved war should be deemed “brilliant” or just extremely “clever,” while in June 2003, Pollack assured New York Times readers that Saddam’s WMD would be found). [..]

So the hawkish Brookings is the prism through which Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy worldview can be best understood. The think tank is filled with former advisers to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, and would certainly provide numerous top-level foreign policy officials in any Hillary Clinton administration. As she put it today at the start: “There are a lot of long-time friends and colleagues who perch here at Brookings.” And she proceeded to deliver exactly the speech one would expect, reminding everyone of just how militaristic and hawkish she is.

Dave Zirin and Jules Boykoff: The US is not fit to host the Olympics

Sorry, Los Angeles, but Washington’s appalling human rights record contravenes the principles of the Olympic movement

On Sept. 1, the Los Angeles City Council voted to authorize the U.S. Olympic Committee’s (USOC) bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics. The committee dropped Boston in July amid tenacious activism, wavering politicians and paltry polling numbers.

Los Angelenos should emulate Bostonians to make sure that their political leaders say no. The Olympic games tend to militarize the host city and go over budget, saddling taxpayers with lopsided fiscal risk while private groups pile up profits. What’s more, the United States’ appalling human rights record should rule the country out as a host. [..]

But the USOC should be spurned. The United States’ horrific human rights record breaches the Olympic Charter’s fundamental principles of Olympism (PDF), which calls for leading by example, social responsibility and respect for universal ethics. The objections over the awarding of Olympic Games to other human rights violators such as China and Russia should also apply to the United States. In fact, the U.S. is a ghastly maverick in many respects. Look no further than the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, where more than 100 detainees – most of them without a single charge – continue to languish.

At a time many Republican presidential candidates and state legislators are furiously focusing on private morality — what people do in their bedrooms, contraception, abortion, gay marriage — America is experiencing a far more significant crisis in public morality.

CEOs of large corporations now earn 300 times the wages of average workers. Insider trading is endemic on Wall Street, where hedge-fund and private-equity moguls are taking home hundreds of millions.

A handful of extraordinarily wealthy people are investing unprecedented sums in the upcoming election, seeking to rig the economy for their benefit even more than it’s already rigged.

Yet the wages of average working people continue to languish as jobs are off-shored or off-loaded onto “independent contractors.”

All this is in sharp contrast to the first three decades after World War II.

Gary Younge: State-sanctioned killings without trial: are these Cameron’s British values?

Three months ago David Cameron celebrated the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. Flanked by the Queen and the archbishop of Canterbury he genuflected before the pillars of Britain’s legal system.

“Magna Carta is something every person in Britain should be proud of,” he said. “Its remaining copies may be faded, but its principles shine as brightly as ever, in every courtroom and every classroom, from palace to parliament to parish church.

“Liberty, justice, democracy, the rule of law – we hold these things dear, and we should hold them even dearer for the fact that they took shape right here, on the banks of the Thames.”

On Monday he confirmed that he had executed two British citizens without trial. Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin were jihadis, from Cardiff and Aberdeen respectively, fighting for Isis in Syria. They were not killed in the heat of battle but with cold calculation. Their assassination was the result of “meticulous planning”, claims Cameron.

Sean McElwee: The education myth

The elite consensus on education hurts college students and recent graduates

Almost everyone agrees that education, innovation and human capital are critical to economic growth and security. And anyone who can’t find a job or is stuck with a low-paying job is told to acquire the skills necessary to succeed in today’s economy.

Unfortunately, the results of believing in that myth have been catastrophic. Earnings have stagnated or declined for everyone except the very top earners, even for those who have educational qualifications, and jobs that didn’t previously require credentials now do. College-educated workers are increasingly forced to take jobs in low-paying industries.

The skills gap is not why workers aren’t prospering. If it were, those with higher skills should be doing better, not worse. Instead, employees are victimized first by policy failure – since the economy is not operating at full employment, those who depend on their labor for living may not find work – and second by the deluded guidance of experts who point to education as a panacea for all their problems.

End extreme poverty. Fight inequality and injustice. Fix climate change. That’s the vision behind the 17 global goals for sustainable development that world leaders will commit to later this month at the UN. The fifth of those 17 goals, to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls,” is absolutely essential. You cannot solve the world’s problems while keeping half the population out of leadership and subordinated to the other half.

There are many paths toward gender equality for all women and girls. But before we in the U.S. presume that’s only a problem in the developing world, let’s take a closer look at our own backyard. I want to focus on just two things we need to do to achieve equality for women here at home: Guarantee every woman affordable access to the full range of reproductive-health-care services; and increase the minimum wage to a livable wage, indexed to inflation.

There’s no doubt that these solutions work. But there’s plenty of opposition from Congressional Republicans and far-right extremists who consider “fair” a four-letter word.

Rev. Dr. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite: The Arson Attack on Planned Parenthood and Political Violence Against Women

Well, what did you expect? After a summer of inflammatory (and inaccurate) politically motivated attacks against Planned Parenthood, one of their clinics has been heavily damaged by what is now determined to be arson.

Attacks on women’s self-determination in body, mind and spirit are a staple of our political life because they work. Unless and until we confront the root reasons why patterns of violence against women work, both overt and covert violence against women will continue to be a political mainstay.  [..]

The political attacks on Planned Parenthood, supported by conservative religious groups, do indeed fuel extremism, and are part of long-standing structural violence against women. Arson is physical violence and it is often and outcome of the structural violence of inflammatory political rhetoric. Structural violence as I have defined it, is a pattern of “constriction of opportunity” and “unjust exploitation” without overt physical violence, though most often backed up with the threat of physical violence.

Michelle Chen: The Unionization of Digital Media

A recent string of campaigns show that while unions at “legacy” newspapers are eroding, organizing still has a place in the digital space.

The digital news team at Al Jazeera America announced last week that it wants to go union, following a string of similar campaigns in recent weeks by web-based journalists who have moved toward or formally voted to establish unions at The Guardian US, Vice, Salon, and Gawker. The organizing bump suggests that, while journalism faces a troubled future, on the labor front, there’s good news to tell.

Though a few hundred workers unionizing isn’t a “game changer” exactly, the campaigns show that while unions at “legacy” newspapers are eroding, organizing still has a place in the digital space.

The announcement, issued on Thursday by New York NewsGuild (part of Communications Workers of America), stated that the workers had “petitioned for representation,” and were, as of Friday, awaiting a response. The main concerns of staff involve “a troubling lack of transparency, inconsistent management and lack of clear redress” for workers’ grievances, as well as what they see as discrepancies in pay and performance evaluation.

Naomi Dean: The Iran Deal and American Jews

Far too much of the analysis of the nuclear deal with Iran has focused on what the American Jewish community and Israeli leaders think, as if those opinions were more important than those of the other Americans, Iranians, and international community at large who are also affected by the deal.

Nevertheless, one of the few bright sides of the media spotlight on American Jewish opinion on the deal has been that the loud and highly publicized infighting has proven quite incontrovertibly that there is no such thing as a Jewish consensus, on anything. As the saying goes: two Jews, three opinions. Unfortunately, when it comes to Israel the institutional American Jewish community has long claimed to represent Jewish Opinion, enclosing the boundaries of debate within a very narrow frame. [..]

The schism in the Jewish community over the Iran deal has been making headlines all summer, but what has been missing from most of these stories is the fact that the debate isn’t solely about Iran or about faith in President Obama. Divergent worldviews-not differing understandings of Iran’s nuclear program and the nature of the deal-shape this divide.

The celebration of Labor Day is a good time to remember the role that labor unions have played in raising living standards and improving the quality of life for working people in the United States. While most people recognize that unions have been beneficial for their members — raising pay, improving work conditions and increasing job security — there is little appreciation of role of labor unions in promoting benefits and work rules that protect all workers.

Unions were crucial in the passage of just about all the benefits and rules that we take for granted today, starting with the weekend. The 40-hour workweek became the standard in the 1937 with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act. This bill, which also put in place a federal minimum wage, required a premium of 50 percent of pay for any hours that an employer required in excess of 40 hours a week. Unions had pressed for similar rules for decades, but it took the power of a militant labor movement, coupled with a sympathetic president and Congress to finally make the 40 hour workweek a standard across the country.

Robert Parry: How Neocons Destabilized Europe

The neocon prescription of endless “regime change” is spreading chaos across the Middle East and now into Europe, yet the neocons still control the mainstream U.S. narrative and thus have diagnosed the problem as not enough “regime change.”

The refugee chaos that is now pushing deep into Europe – dramatized by gut-wrenching photos of Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey – started with the cavalier ambitions of American neocons and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks who planned to remake the Middle East and other parts of the world through “regime change.”

Instead of the promised wonders of “democracy promotion” and “human rights,” what these “anti-realists” have accomplished is to spread death, destruction and destabilization across the Middle East and parts of Africa and now into Ukraine and the heart of Europe. Yet, since these neocon forces still control the Official Narrative, their explanations get top billing – such as that there hasn’t been enough “regime change.” [..]

But the truth is that this accelerating spread of human suffering can be traced back directly to the unchecked influence of the neocons and their liberal fellow-travelers who have resisted political compromise and, in the case of Syria, blocked any realistic efforts to work out a power-sharing agreement between Assad and his political opponents, those who are not terrorists.

Joe Crincione: Why It Matters That Colin Powell and Debbie Wasserman Schultz Support the Iran Agreement.

A Republican former secretary of state and a Democratic “Jewish mother” may have just given us the strongest case yet for the nuclear agreement with Iran.

The first is a pillar of the “realist” camp in the American national security establishment. The second is a rising star in the Democratic Party from a heavily Jewish district in South Florida. Together, they represent key constituencies whose support for the historic accord is critical to isolating right-wing opponents and preventing last-minute sabotage attempts.

Together, they also lay out a compelling narrative of why the agreement is so important to American national security.

Robert Kuttner: Refugee Blues

The mounting catastrophe of Syrian refugees in Europe is one part the same old same old, “not in my backyard,” but with several new wrinkles. One is the complete paralysis of the European Union as a government able to take emergency action.

The humanitarian crisis is happening right now in real time, but the EU operates by consensus if not unanimity and it operates with agonizing slowness. Several nations don’t want anything to do with refugees. Hungary’s brutal response is more candid and ugly than others, but in this story there are few heroes.

One hero is the Prime Minister of Sweden, Stefan Löfven. Sweden has been more generous to refugees and immigrants than most nations, and now faces a backlash.

In the September 2014 general election, when Löfven’s Social Democratic Party narrowly returned to power in a three-party coalition with the Greens and the Left Party, the biggest gainer was the frankly racist Swedish Democratic Party. It abruptly became Sweden’s third largest party, increasing its parliamentary representation from 20 to 49 seats and picking up 13 percent of the popular vote.

I have spent the past week in Denmark and Sweden, exploring how the economic crisis and the immigrant crisis are affecting European politics. Elsewhere in Europe, social democrats are running for cover, because so many of their working class constituents are feeling economically insecure and many are scapegoating immigrants and voting for the populist right.

Labor Day is a time for honoring the working people of this country. It is also a time to celebrate the accomplishments of the activists and organizers who fought for the 40-hour work week, occupational safety, minimum wage law, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and affordable housing. These working people, and their unions, resisted the oligarchs of their day, fought for a more responsive democracy, and built the middle class.

Today we can – and we must – follow their example. It’s time to rebuild the crumbling middle class of our country and make certain that every working person in the United States of America has a chance at a decent life.

Against overwhelming odds, the men and women of the labor movement changed society for the better. If you’ve ever enjoyed a paid vacation, a sick day, or a pension, they are the people to thank. And if you don’t have those benefits on your job today, they are the people who can help you get them.

The economic reality is that while our economy today is much stronger than when President George W. Bush left office 7 years ago, the middle class is continuing its 40-year decline.

Jared Bernstein: Jobs Report: Yes, the Unemployment Rate Is 5.1%. No, We Are Not At Full Employment

Job growth came in below expectations, as August’s payrolls grew 173,000, according to this morning’s jobs report from BLS. Private sector job growth was particularly weak, at 140,000, its weakest month since March. Wage growth remains tame — remarkably so, given the low unemployment rate, which fell to 5.1% last month — and the labor force remains historically low, suggesting significant numbers of potential workers remain on the sidelines, creating downward pressure on wages and a downward bias on the jobless rate.

The unemployment rate, as noted, fell from 5.3% to 5.1%, the lowest rate since April 2008 and the rate that the Federal Reserve believes consistent with full employment in the job market. The labor force remained flat in August, meaning the participation rate is still stuck at a low 62.6%, more than three points off of its peak prior to the downturn. Some of that decline can be assigned to retiring boomers, but some remains due to persistently weak demand.

The number of involuntary part-timers — those working part-time who want full-time hours — remains highly elevated at 6.5 million, though that trend too is moving in the right direction, down 700,000 over the past year.

Ralph Nader: Why Labor Day Matters

Here’s an experiment to try this holiday weekend. Quiz your friends, family and acquaintances on the meaning of Labor Day. You might be surprised by the answers you hear. To many, the true meaning of Labor Day has been unfortunately lost―it’s merely a three-day vacation weekend, unless you work in retail, in which case it is, ironically, a day of work and “special” sales.

Commercialists have transformed Labor Day into a reason for shopping. The fact that Labor Day was conceived as an occasion dedicated to America’s workers and what they have endured is sadly under-acknowledged and unappreciated. (In many other countries, the event is known as “International Workers’ Day” and is celebrated on May 1st.)

Labor Day is a time to celebrate America’s tradespeople―the plumbers, electricians, carpenters, painters, tailors, retail clerks and home health assistants. Celebrate the meat and poultry inspectors, building code inspectors, OSHA and Customs inspectors, sanitation inspectors of supermarkets and restaurants, nuclear, chemical and aircraft inspectors, inspectors of laboratories, hospitals and clinics. Celebrate the bus drivers, miners, and nurses. Celebrate the janitors who often thanklessly clean our office buildings, schools, airports, and more. The list goes on.