Tag: Punting the Pundits

Despite Syriza’s surrender, the new bailout agreement makes Grexit more likely in the future

The battle over the future of Europe – currently centered in Greece – is far from over. But this week, it entered a new phase. [..]

Some economists have correctly noted that a default and devaluation that involves creating a new currency presents additional challenges, as compared with Argentina’s abandonment of the peso/dollar peg. But that doesn’t change the basic story. A developed economy does not transform itself overnight into a failed state simply because it leaves a currency union. We can look at the worst financial crises over the past 25 years, and none of them resulted in the kind of economic damage that Greece has already suffered.

Meanwhile, despite the unconditional surrender of the Syriza government and the parliament’s approval of the hated austerity measures that the European authorities demanded, the ECB did not increase its Emergency Liquidity Assistance to Greek banks so that they could open. The banks stayed closed, and the ECB to this day appears to be in no hurry to let up on the accelerated economic damage that it has been deliberately inflicting on the Greek economy over the past few weeks.v

Jessica Valenti: Ellen Pao isn’t harassed because she’s female. It’s because she’s a feminist

You’d be hard-pressed to find a female boss in Silicon Valley who hasn’t faced some sort of harassment, but it’s difficult to imagine that anyone has gotten more hate than former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao. From racist “Chairman Pao” memes to hate mail and death threats, Pao has been on the receiving end of some of the worst the internet has to offer. Indeed, in her resignation note on the site, Pao wrote that some of what she’s seen on Reddit “made me doubt humanity,” and she urged users to “remember the human,” noting, “I have a family, and I have feelings.”

It’s clear, though, that what made Pao a target wasn’t solely her gender; She wasn’t just being attacked for being female, but for being a feminist. As Kaliya Young, founder of She’s Geeky, told the Guardian recently, “Ellen was at the center of a high-profile sexual discrimination suit versus a major VC firm and she was put in charge of the teenage boy section of the internet. What did you expect was going to happen? It was inevitable that they would turn on her.”

William C. Anderson: Big business built the prison state. Why should we trust them to tear it down?

This week President Obama launched a major push to fix the country’s criminal justice system and end mass incarceration. The reform talk is coming from both sides of the aisle and unlikely partnerships are being forged between big business interests like the Koch brothers and vocal liberals. But big business is tied to the carceral state, so how can they be part of the solution to end it?

Van Jones, the liberal political commentator, and a Koch representative named Mark Holden recently appeared on Democracy Now where they harmoniously backed Obama’s reform plans. Holden stated that “Charles Koch and David Koch are classical liberals who believe in expansive individual liberties in the Bill of Rights and limited government.” [..]

This language reinforces the idea that the prison system in the United States is a business. The Koch Brothers have been connected to the conservative, corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC, for some time.

Nathan Newman: Uber: When Big Data Threatens Local Democracy

Big data is threatening to crush local democracy across the country–and if it succeeds, it may distort local transit and infrastructure development for decades to come.

As Uber has sought to dominate the local taxi industry from Delhi to New York City, the company has deployed its multi-billion dollar venture capital war chest to fight politicians across the country and world, often ignoring local laws as it introduced its app and drivers into the heavily regulated taxi industry.  In New York City, a bill has been introduced to limit the growth of the company locally while the City Council studies the implications for the local taxi industry.

Yesterday, Uber added an attack ad against the City’s mayor Bill De Blasio on the front page of its hailing app, melding its attempt to control local taxi service with seeking control of local politics.  In doing so, it highlights the danger of letting multi-billion dollar global corporations control any part of local transit or other infrastructure, since it gives them a stake in distorting local politics as well.

epublican lawmakers never pass up the opportunity to preempt access to abortion, even if that means hurting breast cancer sufferers. Thus, a vote on a bipartisan House bill that would have greenlit commemorative coins for breast cancer research – through donations to Susan G Komen for the Cure and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation – was shelved Tuesday and amended on Wednesday to exclude Komen entirely, because GOP members opposed the fact that Komen donates money to Planned Parenthood.

Let’s go over that again: a potential $8m fundraiser for the nation’s second-most fatal cancer in women was sidelined and then completely altered because one of the two proposed beneficiaries has given relatively small grants to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings, and Planned Parenthood spends about 3% of its resources on abortions. Apparently, some lawmakers aren’t above also penalizing breasts in the anti-abortion movement’s ongoing attempt to control the nation’s uteruses.

Jason Nichols: Latinos and black Americans have an enemy – and it is not each other

The need for political unity between African-Americans and Latinos is compelling, not least because the futures of African-Americas and Latinos are inextricably linked. We often live in close proximity to one another and both struggle with issues like mass incarceration, racial profiling, police brutality, educational achievement gaps, health disparities, poverty, food deserts and housing discrimination.

There are examples of where political unity between the two groups has yielded desired results, from the election of Harold Washington in Chicago, Antonio Villaraigosa in Los Angeles, and most recently, Barack Obama. Dr King knew and supported the work of Cesar Chavez, and met with many other leaders in the Chicano Movement. We cannot afford to allow trumped up (pun intended) scare tactics to divide us.

Michael Brenner: The Iran Big Deal

For more than a decade, Iran’s nuclear program has been near the top of the United States’ Middle East agenda. To be more accurate, Iran has been near the top of the United States’ Middle East agenda. That is to say, the nuclear issue has been vastly inflated — in part as a logical extension of the prevailing view of the IRI as a rogue state driven by demonic impulse; in part, because it was crucial to an all-out campaign to crimp Iran, to deny it the normal prerogatives of a sovereign state, and ideally to topple the current regime. This view prevails to this day — indeed, the representation of Tehran by Washington as the source of disorder in the region has intensified over time. The nuclear accord has changed nothing in the rhetoric of President Obama and his senior officials. In fact, he has taken several steps to align the United States with the Sunni cause against a purportedly Iranian-organized and directed Shi’ite bloc in Islam’s incipient sectarian war. The most extreme, and logically unsupportable, example is participation in the Saudi-led air campaign against the Houthis (and civilians) in Yemen.

John Oliver, comedic anchorman of HBO show “Last Week Tonight,” made feathers fly when he took on the poultry industry in a May 2015 episode. Last week, it became clear that his gripe with Big Chicken had echoed all the way to the Capitol.

Oliver used his HBO show to attack the giant poultry processors – Tyson Foods, Perdue Farms, Pilgrim’s Pride, and Sanderson Farms – for punishing chicken farmers who speak out against terms dictated by the processors (according to a 2001 study, 71 percent of the farmers live below the poverty line) and pitting them against one another through contract farming.

Their efforts, however, may have been in vain this time. Last week, the House Appropriations Committee approved the fiscal year 2016 Agriculture bill and, for the first time in years, the bill did not include a GIPSA defunding rider. The Senate Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee is expected to release and debate its version of the 2016 Agriculture Appropriations bill this week; historically, the Senate has not attached the defunding rider to its legislation.

As it turns out, Oliver’s beef with the chicken giants may have made a difference.

Kristen Steele: Education: The Next Corporate Frontier

Over the last thirty years or so, private corporations have been steadily taking over school systems all around the world. Going hand in hand with “free” trade and development, the privatization of education is simply another step towards corporate control of the entire economy. If you’re tuned in to education news in the US, you may be familiar with the public school closures in Chicago, the so-called Recovery School District in New Orleans, and the proposed budget cuts in Milwaukee that have brought parents, students and teachers into the streets. But few of us hear about how students in Chile have been protesting for nearly a decade against rampant privatization that has increased economic inequality. Or how the UK government recently passed an education act allowing the conversion of all state schools into privately run “academies”. Or how Structural Adjustment Programs and development aid have paved the way for privatization of schools across Africa, which has resulted in reduced enrollment of girls and exclusion of the poorest children. Or how similar takeovers are happening in Canada, Sweden, New Zealand, India, and many other countries.

Privatization exists in different forms, including vouchers, public private partnerships, low-fee private schools, and charter schools. Whatever it’s called, it amounts to the same thing: private corporations gaining control of and profiting from an essential public function. In every country, the identical argument is used: public schools are failing, reform is needed and big business will do it best, providing choice and efficiency. If the statistics don’t match the argument, they are concealed or doctored to fit.

Katherine Paul: House Ag Committee Says ‘No’ to GMO Labeling, What’s Next?

With no debate and only a voice vote, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Agriculture today (July 14, 2015) passed out of committee H.R. 1599, a bill to preempt states’ rights to label GMOs. Within hours, it was announced that the bill will go straight to the House floor, as early as next week, with no vote in the Energy and Commerce Committee. [..]

Time and again, independent experts have stated that the cost of labeling GMO foods and ingredients, to manufacturers, retailers and consumers, would be negligible here in the U.S., just as it has been in the more than 60 countries that already require labeling. GMO labels are costless, as pointed out in this Washington Post article. Companies regularly update their food packaging as they come up with new designs or marketing strategies.

And then there was the ultimate lie about GMOs, that they have been “proven safe:”

Democrats who once spoke out against Bush’s militarism have enabled Obama’s

When the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, began this month by issuing a farewell report on U.S. military strategy, the gist was hardly big news. “Dempsey to Pentagon: Prepare for the Never-Ending War” read the headline on the cover page of the National Journal.

The “war on terror” now looks so endless that no one speculates anymore about when it might conclude. “This war, like all wars, must end,” President Barack Obama declared in a major speech more than two years ago. “That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.” But midway through 2015, this war seems as interminable as ever. [..]

It does not have to be this way. America need not propagate what Martin Luther King Jr. aptly called “the madness of militarism.” But to turn away from perpetual war, many people will first need to overcome party loyalties and summon the kind of resolve that King showed in challenging the tragic folly of war policies coming from a Democrat in the White House.

Bill Blum: Is Antonin Scalia Off His Rocker or Just a Sore Loser?

Has Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia completely lost his mind? Or is he better understood as the court’s biggest sore loser, who just can’t accept the fact that his colleagues roundly rejected his blustery constitutional and statutory interpretation when they ruled last month in favor of same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges and Obamacare in King v. Burwell.

Although I favor sore-loser explanation over the Mad-Hatter analysis there are good reasons to answer both questions in the affirmative. They are not, after all, mutually exclusive. [..]

With his churlish response to Kennedy, the long arc of Scalia’s tenure is now clearly bending toward travesty and, even more importantly, isolation. He’s become the judicial equivalent of the proverbial old man screaming at the neighborhood kids to get off his lawn. He may be crazy or angry or a little of both. What matters most is that he’s on his way to becoming irrelevant.

 When Congress finally passed fast-track trade authority last month, there was a major problem for President Obama and his trade negotiators: a provision of the bill forbid any fast-tracked trade deal from including countries on Tier 3 of the State Department’s human trafficking list.

 That’s the worst classification the United States gives to countries in its Trafficking In Persons annual report, a status earned by countries like Zimbabwe, Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and North Korea. Also on the list: Malaysia, one of the 12 potential signatories to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that is in the final round of negotiations this month.

Malaysia is home to many “outsourcing companies” that are, in reality, professional slaving operations: foreign workers, often refugees fleeing desperate situations in nearby countries like Burma, are recruited to the country with the promise of legitimate work but then subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking. The State Department and international human rights groups have routinely concluded the Malaysian government does very little to inhibit the traffickers’ operation.

Robert Kuttner: Delusion in the Desert

I’m here at Planet Hollywood as the token liberal to participate in two debates — one on what is killing the American Dream; the other a mock trial of the Federal Reserve. Paul Krugman is also here, debating the cause and cure of inequality. We’re outnumbered about a thousand to one.

The annual FreedomFest convention of some 2,000 libertarian conservatives is doubly surreal. What better setting for libertarian dreams than fantastical Las Vegas — the free market as casino, made flesh.

Like casino operators, these libertarians live on fantasies. They inhabit an imagined universe where markets never do anything wrong and government never does anything right. This is comforting because it is true by definition and thus resists any evidence to the contrary. Mostly they are very nice, idealistic people, if sweetly delusional about economics.

Patrick Cockburn: We Can All Get by Quite Well Without Banks – Ireland Managed to Survive Without Them

A 1970 strike in Ireland provoked an admirable outbreak of ingenuity – Greece should take note

Television reporters stand in front of the shut doors of banks in Athens and speak as if a few days more of bank closure brings the Greeks that much closer to catastrophe. Media coverage dwells obsessively on the theme that for Greece it is five minutes to midnight, but somehow midnight never comes. Shuttered banks are a striking physical symbol of economic disaster, but even they are not proof that the final dénouement is at hand.

I recall a six-and-a-half month strike that closed all banks in Ireland in 1970 which was meant to have similarly calamitous results as predicted for Greece today, but in fact had very little destructive impact. Contrary to expectations, Irish people rapidly found other ways of carrying out the functions previously performed by the banking industry. The economist Michael Fogarty, who wrote the official report on the bank dispute, was quoted by the Irish Independent as saying that “the services of the clearing banks proved by no means as indispensable as would have been expected before the dispute”. Others take the example of the Irish bank strike as evidence that much of what banks do is a “socially useless activity”.

A 1970 strike in Ireland provoked an admirable outbreak of ingenuity – Greece should take note

John Nichols: What Is Scott Walker Trying to Hide?

As the Wisconsin governor prepares to announce his candidacy for president, his office admits involvement in an attempt to gut open-records laws.

As he prepares to launch his 2016 presidential bid, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is caught up in a hometown controversy that is going from bad to worse.

The governor-whom former White House counsel John Dean refers to as “more Nixonian than Nixon”-has never been much for transparency. But a botched attempt by his legislative allies to gut the state’s open-records law has blown up on Walker in a big way. [..]

 But Walker danced around questions about whether he or his aides were involved in the ham-handed attempt to make it dramatically harder for citizens and journalists to review his official actions at a point when he is stepping onto the national stage.

That’s understandable, as getting caught out on an attempt to undermine open government is not usually considered the right move on the eve of announcing one’s presidential candidacy.

For most of my life, a flag representing white supremacist violence against black people flew at the capitol of my native state. It is a very big deal that this emblem of hatred and oppression is finally coming down.

Gov. Nikki Haley was expansive after the state Legislature finished action early Thursday on a bill consigning the Confederate battle flag to the museum displays where it belongs: “It is a new day in South Carolina, a day we can all be proud of.” I have to entertain the notion that she may be right.

In the South, William Faulkner wrote, the past isn’t even past. The flag represented, for some white South Carolinians, a past that was invented out of whole cloth-a past in which something other than slavery was the cause of a conflict Southerners called the “War Between the States.”

Joe Conason: Benghazi! Why Trey Gowdy Is Concealing Blumenthal Deposition

The strange saga of the House Select Committee on Benghazi continues as its chair, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., fends off renewed questions about the committee’s purpose, as well as demands to release the sworn deposition of Sidney Blumenthal, taken behind closed doors on June 16.

In a CNN interview, Hillary Clinton-the actual target of Gowdy’s investigation-recently brushed off accusations about her use of a private email server and mocked his partisan probe. [..]

Gowdy answered by reiterating previous claims that only his committee’s intrepid work had revealed Clinton’s email practices. [..]

Evidently, Gowdy prefers his staffers to leak the Blumenthal testimony, in order to smear both Clinton and the witness he claims to be protecting. For weeks, snippets of Blumenthal’s testimony and of his emails to and from Clinton have turned up in the media, to advance negative, highly distorted perceptions of both the former secretary of state and her longtime friend.

Meanwhile the Gowdy-led committee has learned little of real significance, despite spending millions of taxpayer dollars. But they have keenly pursued matters of partisan interest, such as Blumenthal’s work for Correct The Record, a political committee that publicly defends Clinton and other Democrats, and Media Matters for America, the watch dog against right-wing misinformation in the media. David Brock, the founder of both groups, and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former Maryland lieutenant governor who chairs Correct The Record’s board sent a sharply worded letter with a simple demand.

As you may have heard, Democratic turnout dropped off a cliff again last year, just like it did in 2010. I was wondering why, so I asked. I polled Florida non-voters. I found that the main reason why they didn’t vote last year was simple: They couldn’t see any difference between the candidates. When there is no difference between the candidates, Democrats don’t vote, and Democrats lose.  [..]

As Gov. Howard Dean has said, if you offer people a choice between a real Republican and a fake Republican, they will choose the real Republican every time. And they did. Getting back to our poll, we focused on people who actually could have voted, not permanent residents, convicted felons whose rights had not been restored or children. We offered the non-voters 12 different reasons to explain why they hadn’t voted. Reason #1, the most “popular,” was that “people did not like either choice for Governor.” Forty-one percent of the Democratic non-voters said that this was the main reason why people didn’t vote. [..]

The voters deserve a choice. In fact, they insist on it. Or they simply won’t vote.

Dave Johnson: Enormous, Humongous May Trade Deficit Slows Economy

The U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday that the May goods and services trade deficit was an enormous, humongous $40.9 billion, up a bit from an enormous, humongous $40.7 billion in April.

Our enormous, humongous trade deficit is a measure of how many jobs, factories, companies and industries we are losing to our pro-Wall Street trade policies. A trade deficit drains our economy of wealth, jobs and future economic opportunity. [..]

When you close a factory in the U.S., move the jobs and production to a low-wage, low-democracy country, and bring the same goods back to the U.S. to sell in the same stores this “increases cross-border trade.” But since this trade is going in one direction, it also increases our trade deficit, which hurts our economy. Moving the jobs to places where the workers are exploited means that a few investors and executives can pocket the difference in what is paid in wages and environmental protection costs, while impoverishing the workers and communities on all sides of the trade borders.

And to top it off, the U.S. doesn’t even make these companies pay their taxes, so we literally get nothing back for the lost jobs and wages.

Isaiah J. Polle: Schumer Takes the Low Road to Fund a Transportation Bill

Key Democrats in the Senate on Thursday worked to ratchet up the pressure on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, calling for him in a letter to move forward with a long-term transportation bill before federal authorization for the program expires at the end of the month.

But one of the signatories to the letter to McConnell, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), has poisoned the effort by adding to the debate a corporate tax giveaway plan that would leave behind crumbs for these desperately needed transportation investments. He is winning the applause of conservatives like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and is looking to move a sweeping plan to slash corporate taxes through Congress. From the progressive movement, it should be receiving loud expressions of scorn and an uprising to block it. [..]

The problem is that, as the Schumer-Portman framework makes explicit, that tax would be “a one-time transition toll charge at a rate significantly lower than the statutory corporate rate” of 35 percent. It is, in effect, a reward to multinational corporations for using schemes to shunt the profits from U.S. sales through overseas subsidiaries that are often little more than a post-office box in a low-tax country. Plus, the “transition toll” is a transition to a more permanent lowering of corporate tax rates – at a time when the federal taxes corporations pay as a share of the national economy is already at a historic low.

Musa al-Gharbi: America’s biggest terror threat is from the far right

The US should use its monitoring tools on extremists of all stripes

According to a New America Foundation report, right-wing extremists have killed nearly twice as many Americans through domestic terrorism as “jihadists” have since 9/11. However, the same database shows that Muslims constitute a much higher percentage of those indicted on terrorism charges or killed when confronted by authorities. Despite being responsible for only 35 percent of the terrorism casualties, they account for 60 percent of terrorism indictments. The reason for the discrepancy is that right-wing extremists tend not to be monitored or investigated as heavily.

Shortly after President Barack Obama’s election – particularly after a groundbreaking 2009 Department of Homeland Security report on the threat of right-wing extremism – Republican lawmakers, along with conservative media and lobbying groups, argued that the White House was politicizing the term “extremism” in order to deploy law enforcement against otherwise lawful dissidents, such as those affiliated with the tea party. [..]

There was no discussion of the threat posed by these ideologues at the recent White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism. In fact, law enforcement and national security agencies are generally hesitant to refer to acts committed by right-wing ideologues as terrorism.

This is a short essay on voter anger — its origin, its attributes, its meaning and its cure. Hint: Most Americans are worse off than they were a long time ago.

I started noticing voter anger around 2009. Initially, its locus was the Tea Party. They’re the ones who would form a circle around a political event, holding hands, and start chanting expletives. I attributed this to the Tea Party’s deep dissatisfaction with living in the 21st century. To them, basically, everything went south when Jane Wyatt stopped playing Robert Young’s Stepford wife on Father Knows Best, and started playing Spock’s mother, Amanda … Grayson, on Star Trek. (Does that mean that Spock and I are future relatives? I don’t know.) For them, things have never been the same since.

Generally speaking, the problem for Team Blue is not anger; it’s apathy. However, by roughly the year 2012, Team Blue had caught up in the Anger Games, and the score was tied. [..]

But here is the deeper explanation for all of that anger: For most Americans, life simply is getting harder. This was painfully obvious from a Sage Foundation study last year, following up on an article in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The study looked at changes in the wealth of American households over a decade, from 2003 to 2013. The study found that median net worth had dropped by 36 percent, from $87,992 to $56,335.

Let me repeat that: The net worth of the average American household dropped by more than one-third in ten years. The decline from the 2007 peak was almost 50 percent, in just six years. (Most of that loss was in the value of one’s home — home is where the heartache is.)

That’s why everyone is so angry.

Dean Baker: Sluggish economy? Blame the weather

Ignore economics writers who make grand conclusions about short-term data

Economists and economic reporters tend to get carried away about short-term movements in the economy. They often assess data without considering the larger context, which can lead them to exaggerate the good or bad news. And since most economists and economic reporters move in herds, we get dramatic tales of booms and busts in the business section that don’t necessarily correspond to anything in the real world. [..]

There is a banal explanation for this rapid switch from boom to bust, as well as for the original boom itself: the weather. The weather was unusually bad throughout the Northeast and Midwest this year, and snowfall in major metropolitan areas such as Boston hit new records. When it’s cold, when there’s a lot of snow on the ground and when the streets are blocked, people are less likely to go out to dinner or shop for clothes. They are also likely to put off buying a car or looking for a new house. As a result, consumption is likely to be much weaker than would otherwise be the case.

Of course, Boston and dozens of other cities get snow almost every winter; this routinely disrupts peoples’ regular consumption patterns. That’s why our data are seasonally adjusted; it doesn’t matter that we get six inches or a foot of snow in the Northeast if that’s what was expected. It only skews the numbers when we get six feetof snow, which was the case in Boston this year. So when winter is worse than usual, the economy – in real life, and particularly in the papers – suffers.

Diane Ravitch: Arne Duncan’s Legacy

When Obama was elected, many educators and parents thought that Obama would bring a new vision of the federal role in education, one that freed schools from the test-and-punish mindset of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind. But Arne Duncan and Barack Obama had a vision no different from George W. Bush and doubled down on the importance of testing, while encouraging privatization and undermining the teaching profession with a $50 million grant to Teach for America to place more novice teachers in high-needs schools. Duncan never said a bad word about charters, no matter how many scandals and frauds were revealed. [..]

It will take years to recover from the damage that Arne Duncan’s policies have inflicted on public education. He exceeded the authority of his office to promote a failed agenda, one that had no evidence behind it. The next president and the next Secretary of Education will have an enormous job to do to restore our nation’s public education system from the damage done by Race to the Top. We need leadership that believes in the joy of learning and in equality of educational opportunity. We have not had either for 15 years.

George Monbiot: Greece is the latest battleground in the financial elite’s war on democracy

Greece may be financially bankrupt, but the troika is politically bankrupt. Those who persecute this nation wield illegitimate, undemocratic powers, powers of the kind now afflicting us all. Consider the International Monetary Fund. The distribution of power here was perfectly stitched up: IMF decisions require an 85% majority, and the US holds 17% of the votes.

The IMF is controlled by the rich, and governs the poor on their behalf. It’s now doing to Greece what it has done to one poor nation after another, from Argentina to Zambia. Its structural adjustment programmes have forced scores of elected governments to dismantle public spending, destroying health, education and all the means by which the wretched of the earth might improve their lives. [..]

The crushing of political choice is not a side-effect of this utopian belief system but a necessary component. Neoliberalism is inherently incompatible with democracy, as people will always rebel against the austerity and fiscal tyranny it prescribes. Something has to give, and it must be the people. This is the true road to serfdom: disinventing democracy on behalf of the elite.

Pope Francis this week embarked on a seven-day “homecoming” tour of Latin America on his unstoppable quest to defend the planet and the poor.

The continent-the most unequal region in the world, and the Argentine pontiff’s home turf-will likely provide fertile ground for more of his legendary sermons on poverty and inequality. After addressing a crowd of a million in Guayaquil, Ecuador, on Monday, Francis is scheduled to attend a meeting of grass-roots political activists and visit one of the continent’s largest prisons, in Bolivia, as well as a slum and a children’s hospital in Paraguay.

While he advocates for South America’s impoverished and disenfranchised, its prisoners, its indigenous peoples and its children, one group is unlikely to feature in Francis’ apparently radical agenda: its women.

Despite his efforts to champion his constituency-the world’s poor, of which the vast majority are women-the pope tends to overlook the feminized nature of poverty and inequality.

Amy B. Dean: Wisconsin swindled by Scott Walker’s jobs scam

When corporations fail to deliver on promises to create jobs, taxpayers deserve real accountability

Over the course of the last month, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has been scrambling to do damage control in the wake of revelations about one of his signature economic programs.

In the name of creating jobs, this trademark initiative of the potential Republican presidential candidate handed hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to businesses across the state. But Walker’s administration apparently neglected to check if these companies actually hired any new employees as a result.

Wisconsinites have been understandably roiled – but this is not a problem that’s confined to their state.

Across the country, “economic development” programs in states such as Texas, Florida, Michigan and New York are handing out public resources to private hands in the name of spurring “job creators.” Astoundingly, they often fail to uphold even the most minimal level of accountability and oversight over how this public money is used.

The solution to this problem is simple: When corporations fail to deliver on job creation promises, they should be forced to pay back the money.

Jessica Zimmerman: Rightwingers think capitalism’s great – if you’re selling something they like

Part of the reason crowdfunding draws so much ire is that it necessarily happens before the product is a reality. It’s the old-as-the-hills technique of the “presale” – small manufacturers take money to reserve a product before it’s made, so they know what demand is and avoid overproducing (It’s also related to the even more venerable Proper Capitalist approach that you might know as “looking for investors”.) There’s nothing new or weird about it, presuming that your belief in the free market economy is sincere. The atheist shoes, the inflatable Lionel Richie head, the TARDIS launch – these pass without comment, or at least without outrage. It’s their money, right? One born every minute.

And yet, when a woman entrepreneur like Ijeoma Oluo or Anita Sarkeesian asks for investments or gauges interest pre-production, it’s taken as begging at best, a con at worst. How dare they just ask for money? That’s not what leaning in means! Well OK, it is what it means, but you’re not supposed to actually do it!

Is the problem that women are not supposed to take part in this economy – not supposed to be creators or entrepreneurs? Or is it just that they’re hawking a product that makes men mad – so mad their commitment to personal freedom suddenly transforms into a sacred duty to protect vulnerable wallets from rapacious feminists?

Jessica Evans: World Bank’s silence ignores repression

The bank should develop a strategy to end attacks on community members and activists and provide remedies to victims

In countries around the world, people who suffer harm because of development projects financed by the World Bank Group take grave risks to speak out and often face severe consequences. Yet the bank has taken few concrete steps to protect community members from harassment and ensure that people can speak freely without putting themselves or their family members at risk.

In Cambodia security forces have jailed Nget Khun, a 75-year-old community activist on several occasions for protesting evictions stemming from projects financed by the World Bank (PDF). Grandma Mommy, as Khun is known locally, and her fellow community members have been in and out of jail for years. During a May 2012 arrest, she said, four or five security personnel carried her “like they were carrying a pig” and threw her in a car.

After a summary trial in which her defense lawyer was given no time to prepare his case or call defense witnesses, she and 12 other activists were convicted of illegal occupancy of public property and obstructing public officials. An appeals court later suspended their sentences after public pressure, but they spent a month in jail. In November 2014 she and six other women were convicted of obstructing traffic and spent five months in jail before being pardoned in April. The government has also violently cracked down on protesters and threatened community activists.

The bank has strongly opposed the government’s plan to evict people from their homes in Khun’s community, but it has been silent about the attacks on outspoken community members.

Megan Condis: #RedditRevolt is harassment dressed up as free speech

Users’ protest pushes back against inclusive democratic participation in virtual spaces

It is growing difficult to keep track of the so-called scandals continuously erupting in geek culture. First there was #GamerGate, the opening salvo in the fight against feminist criticism of games and gaming’s male-dominated culture. Then there was #GamesSoWhite, which, depending on who you ask, is either an attempt to call attention to the lack of racial diversity in video games or a demand that game developers abandon their artistic vision to please a mob of PC police.

Now we have #RedditRevolt, a hashtag that originated as an attempt to oust Reddit Interim CEO Ellen Pao over the decision to ban several of the site’s controversial message boards dedicated to specific topics, called subreddits. (Reddit is both a social networking site and an online bulletin board; users determine what content is featured on the front page by voting posts up or down. Currently the tenth most visited website in the United States, it has received more than 7 billion page views in the last month.)

The hashtag was most recently revived over the weekend in response to the firing of a popular Reddit staffer, with volunteer moderators shutting down a huge number of subreddits in protest and making entire sections of the site temporarily go dark. In a second piece to follow, I’ll discuss how this most recent use of the hashtag provides so-called “consumer revolt” cover for what is essentially an anti-progressive agenda. But to understand the most recent turn of events, let’s first consider the original #RedditRevolt.