Tag: Punting the Pundits

It wasn’t that long ago – 4 November 2008 – that the US had an election that galvanized a generation of activists to change policies in this country that would have enshrined into law the continued marginalization of a large group of people. I’m not talking about who was elected president, or which political party took the most seats in Congress: rather, a ballot initiative in the state of California, called Proposition 8, passed by a four-point margin that night and successfully amended the state’s constitution by adding language that defined marriage as being between “one man and one woman”. [..]

But I worry that, with full marriage equality, much of the queer community will be left wondering how else to engage with a society that still wants to define who we are – and who in our community will be left to push for full equality for all transgender and queer people, now that this one fight has been won. I fear that our precious movements for social justice and all the remarkable advancements we have made are now vulnerable to being taken over by monied people and institutions, and that those of us for whom same-sex marriage rights brings no equality will be slowly erased from our movement and our history.

Joe Conason: The Real Meaning of the Confederate Flag

In the intensifying debate over the Confederate flag, important clues about the true meaning of this seditious symbol are staring us in the face. Dozens of those clues were posted by an angry, glaring Dylann Storm Roof on the “Last Rhodesian” website, where the confessed Charleston killer pays homage to certain flags-notably those of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia, as well as the old Confederacy-while he enthusiastically desecrates another.

Pictures of Roof burning, stomping and spitting on the Stars and Stripes are interspersed among the photos of him grasping and waving the Confederate battle flag, sometimes while holding a gun. “I hate the sight of the American flag,” he raged in a long screed on the site. “Modern American patriotism is an absolute joke.”

What this racial terrorist meant to express, in crude prose and pictures, is a lesson that the diehard defenders of the Confederate flag should no longer ignore: To uphold the banner of secession is to reject patriotism-and has never meant anything else.

Bill Boyarsky: Obamacare: Not Perfect, But ‘Here to Stay’

Republicans have been cornered by a president they had vowed to drive from office. Obamacare, an imperfect but badly needed revolution in health care, is, as President Barack Obama said, “here to stay.” Tens of millions of Americans will keep health insurance long denied them, and millions more will obtain such policies in the future.

Republicans sound angry and confused as they try to convince these many millions that they got a bad deal. It reminds me of earlier GOP generations warning Americans that Social Security and Medicare would land us all in the poor house. No doubt their latest effort will backfire, too.

Dr. Jill Stein has some great ideas about how to create “deep system change, moving from the greed and exploitation of corporate capitalism to a human-centered economy that puts people, planet and peace over profit.”

If the 2012 Green Party presidential nominee and contender for the party’s 2016 nod gets a hearing, those ideas will expand and improve the national debate. They could also strike a chord with the millions of Americans who are ready for a plan to “end unemployment and poverty; avert climate catastrophe; build a sustainable, just economy; and recognize the dignity and human rights of everyone in our society and our world.” [..]

The question is whether Stein, who this week formally launched her second presidential bid, will gain the hearing that is necessary to realize that potential. That is far from guaranteed, because the status quo polices presidential campaigns in order to maintain itself. That policing begins with ballot-access demands that make it hard for millions of American voters to have the multi-party choices that are available to voters in Germany, Japan, France, Britain, Canada, and every other credible democracy.

Even if Stein and the Greens secure every available ballot line-and they have a smart, ambitious plan for busting through the barriers-that still does not guarantee that she will be heard.

Faiza Patel: When will surveillance reform stop being just ‘cool’?

The USA Freedom Act marks the beginning, not the end, of the fight to protect our privacy

Last week, former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden declared that he was “cool” with the recently enacted USA Freedom Act, which reined in government bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. His characterization of that program as “little” is no doubt accurate. Information from the archive of documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed many other programs that pose equal or greater risks to Americans’ privacy.

But Hayden is too quick to assume that the phone records program will be the only reform. The passage of the USA Freedom Act is the first curtailment of intelligence authorities since the 9/11 attacks and should mark the beginning – not the end – of reform.

Peter van Buren: Five Things That Won’t Work in Iraq

When at First You Don’t Succeed, Fail, Fail Again

In one form or another, the U.S. has been at war with Iraq since 1990, including a sort-of invasion in 1991 and a full-scale one in 2003. During that quarter-century, Washington imposed several changes of government, spent trillions of dollars, and was involved in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. None of those efforts were a success by any conceivable definition of the term Washington has been capable of offering.

Nonetheless, it’s the American Way to believe with all our hearts that every problem is ours to solve and every problem must have a solution, which simply must be found. As a result, the indispensable nation faces a new round of calls for ideas on what “we” should do next in Iraq.

With that in mind, here are five possible “strategies” for that country on which only one thing is guaranteed: none of them will work.

George Zornick: What’s Next for the GOP After the Obamacare Ruling?

The case of King v. Burwell may have been the last legitimate chance to disable the Affordable Care Act. So the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in favor of the administration, with only the conservative rump of the Court dissenting in amusingly strident terms, should leave conservatives despondent. [..]

And as always, this split will continue to trouble the GOP. The hard-core members still have ample opportunity to use real leverage to disable or hurt the Affordable Care Act. At some point this year, Congress will have to pass government spending bills-and there is considerable conservative activism around using the process, which only requires 50 Senate votes, to defund significant parts of the law.

Some more moderate senators are already urging caution, and openly saying the GOP is better served by waiting until 2016 to take on Obamacare. But if the hard-core members, and the base they represent, not to mention ambitious renegades like Ted Cruz, force the GOP’s hand, that dog might start nibbling at the bumper again within a matter of months.

Here is the reality of the American economy. Despite an explosion in technology and a huge increase in worker productivity, the middle class of this country continues its 40-year decline. Today, millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages and median family income is almost $5,000 less than it was in 1999.

Meanwhile, the wealthiest people and the largest corporations are doing phenomenally well. Today, 99 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent, while the top one-tenth of 1 percent own almost as much wealth as the bottom 40 percent. In the last two years, the wealthiest 14 people in this country increased their wealth by $157 billion. That increase is more than is owned by the bottom 130 million Americans — combined.

Over the last 40 years, the largest corporations in this country have closed thousands of factories in the United States and outsourced millions of American jobs to low-wage countries overseas. That is why we need a new trade policy and why I am opposed to the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership now before Congress.

Robert Reich: Making the Economy Work for the Many and Not the Few #11: Medicare Isn’t the Problem; It’s the Solution

Again and again the upcoming election you’ll hear conservatives claim that Medicare — the health insurance program for America’s seniors — is running out of money and must be pared back.

Baloney. Medicare isn’t the problem. In fact, Medicare is more efficient than private health insurance.The real problem is that the costs of health care are expected to rise steeply.

Medicare could be the solution — the logical next step after the Affordable Care Act toward a single-payer system.

Please see the accompanying video — #11 in our series on ideas to make the economy work for the many rather than for the few. And please share.

Dave Johnson: Wall Street and Big Corporations Got What They Wanted — This Time

“Fast track” passes. Our Congress — the supposed representatives of the people — voted to cut themselves and us out of the process of deciding what “the rules” for doing business “in the 21st century” will be.

How do the plutocrats and oligarchs and their giant multinational corporations get what they want when a pesky democracy is in their way? They push that pesky democracy out of their way.

Because of fast track, when the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and any other secretly negotiated “trade” agreements are completed, Congress must vote in a hurry, with only limited debate; cannot make any amendments, no matter what is in the agreement; and cannot filibuster. Nothing else coming before our Congress gets that kind of skid greasing, only corporate-written “trade” agreements — and it doesn’t matter how far the contents go beyond actual “trade.”

Althea Butler: The decision to forgive is rooted in faith. The desire to forget is rooted in racism

For many people, the forgiveness offered to Dylann Roof, the man charged with killing of nine black members of Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, at his arraignment by the families of his victims is impossible to understand – and worthy of veneration. “I forgive you” said Nadine Gardner, daughter of slain church member Ethel Lance. “I will never ever hold her again. But I forgive you, and may God have mercy on your soul”.

But how could someone forgive such a heinous crime so quickly, so easily? The answer lies in part with Christian interpretation of the New Testament, a history of racialized violence and the civil rights movement.

Forgiveness is a spiritual practice and biblical mandate from the New Testament that many American Christians engage in as a part of their faith. Familiar scriptures (such as Jesus forgiving the Romans while hanging on a cross, or saying that forgiveness should be given 70 times seven) are staples of Christian teaching and theology. Forgiveness is enshrined in the Lord’s prayer – forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. These scriptures point to the power of forgiveness not only as a way to absolve transgressions, but to ensure that the person extending forgiveness will be forgiven of theirs. For many Christians, these teachings form the foundation of their Christian faith, even when that forgiveness can be difficult to give.

Black Lives Matter and the push to raise the minimum wage show how racial and economic justice are intertwined

Martin Luther King, Jr. is a national hero for helping end racial segregation in the United States. Yet he spent the last years of his life working as much for economic justice as for racial justice.

When he was shot and killed in Memphis in April 1968, King was in the city on behalf of striking sanitation workers who were trying to organize a union and win higher wages. The predominantly black labor force had to work seven days a week with no vacations, carrying 80 pound crates of rotting garbage. They were being paid wages so low that many were forced to supplement their income with public assistance programs.

Dr. King always understood that the fight for labor rights was integral to attaining true social, political and economic equality. In a speech at the May 1961 AFL-CIO Constitutional Convention, he linked the aspirations of African-Americans in the United States with organized labor’s cause.

Sonali Kolhatkar: How Politicians, Media, and the Gun Lobby Enable Racist Terror

The Charleston Massacre is a product of simmering racial tensions that elites continue to deny. Will the attack be a turning point for change?

On September 15, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed, killing four African-American girls. The incident shocked people around the nation and galvanized the civil rights movement, making leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. even more determined to end segregation. Just as that horrific attack was a reflection of racist violence and became a pivotal event in the civil rights movement, so too should the Charleston shooting be seen as a seminal moment, indicative of simmering racial hatred. However, right-wing conservatives like South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham want us to believe that the massacre of nine African-Americans at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, last week was about religion more than race, a sentiment repeatedly echoed on Fox News. But in fact, the Charleston massacre has much more in common with the 1963 Alabama church bombing. Nine people lost their lives because of a pathology in American society that we continue to be unwilling to address. Will we seize this moment and change history before more terror strikes?

What is different now is that the resurgence of white supremacist attacks on African-Americans comes at the same time that the U.S. government is fighting a “war on terror” against radical Islam. The hypocrisy of calling Boston marathon bomber Dhozkar Tsarnaev a “terrorist,” while labeling the Charleston perpetrator Dylann Roof as a “shooter” who may have been “mentally ill,” has raised the ire of many. And yet almost no politician has used the word “terrorist” as yet to describe Roof. FBI Director James Comey has explicitly ruled out calling it a terrorist act. On his website Roof referred to “black on white crime,” which he googled and then confessed that “I have never been the same since that day.” His statement to one of the survivors of the Charleston massacre that “you rape our women, and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go,” exemplifies a long-standing racist paranoia that African-American men are preying on white women.

Michelle Goldberg: The 2 Degrees of Separation Between Dylann Roof and the Republican Party

News that Earl Holt, president of the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, has donated $65,000 to Republicans, including Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Rick Santorum, has ricocheted around the media since The Guardian broke it last night. No wonder: It reveals a mere two degrees of separation between the racist murderer Dylann Roof, who says the CCC helped inspire him, and the GOP. It might be unfair to make this link if the support only went one way-after all, politicians can’t be held responsible for the views of everyone who gives them money. But the entanglement between the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Republican Party is longer and deeper than just a few checks, and for many years, it was mutual.

“The public sees the CCC and wants to think of it as an extremist group, which it is, but it’s also a group that’s had a foothold historically in mainstream politics,” says Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Michelle Chen: Someone Has to Sort Your Recycling and It’s a Disgusting and Dangerous Job

The green economy was chugging along at the Nevada paper recycling plant that morning in June 2012, feeding an oversized mound of waste toward a conveyor belt. But when the machine got jammed, the worker who tried to unclog it suddenly got flattened by a 2.5-ton mass of paper. A coworker rushed to extract him using a front-end loader, but according to a government report, the worker died at the hospital two days later, smothered by the dead trees he had been tasked with salvaging.

The industries that pride themselves on being friends of the earth are often hostile to workers, according to new research on the safety conditions in recycling plants. Published by Massachusetts Council for Occupational Safety and Health (MassCOSH), National COSH, and other advocacy groups, the analysis of the industry shows that despite the green sector’s clean, progressive image, workers remain imperiled by old school industrial hazards. Workers face intense stress, dangerous machinery and inadequate safeguards, while toiling in strenuous positions amid constant toxic exposures.

“With cat-like tread upon our foes we steal.” So boasted Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance as they decided to try a little burglary for a change. And “steal” is the appropriate word.

It’s hardly a surprise that Republican congressional leaders and their cadre of Democratic allies spurred on by Barack Obama are resorting to a bagful of parliamentary tricks to put the Trans-Pacific Partnership on a “take it or leave it but you can’t change it” fast-track to enactment by Tuesday.

No sooner had the first round gone to pro-democracy forces than Speaker Boehner — forever remembered as the man who handed out tobacco lobby checks to members on the House floor — promptly scheduled a new vote allowing time to bring pressure on naysayers.

Michael Arceneaux: The Key Thing Conservatives Don’t Get About Obama’s Use Of ‘N*****’

I think I speak for many black people when I say that I’m wonderfully bored with white people’s obsession with policing whether or not it’s ever appropriate for a black person to use “nigger” and all its variances. The majority never really has a right to question the marginalized-but particularly when context is key. And yet, they do it anyway, again and again. This time President Obama is the target, but the intent is the same: to be caught up in a word rather than the crux of an argument about systemic racism. [..]

I wish I could be amused by mass media’s disingenuousness. President Obama is not the first president to use “nigger,”-he’s merely the first one not to use it as a slur. For all his work on passing civil rights legislation, former Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson let the word fly freely and routinely from his mouth. The same goes for former Republican president Richard Nixon, and for Harry Truman, when he called Adam Clayton Powell “that damned nigger preacher.”

And, you know, all those other presidents who owned slaves and expressed deep contempt for black people.

So, with that in mind, what purpose does it serve asking whether or not the first black president’s use of “nigger” in the context of a larger reflection on covert versus overt racism relevant? Because a few white people will object? Who cares? How much longer are we going to entertain thoughts of whether or not there is a double standard at play? This is a ruse of the highest order. Even if you don’t agree with the approach, black people use “nigga” in a different context than “nigger.” Whites have every other advantage over blacks; they can take the “L” on this one word.

Thanks to a last-minute deal last Thursday between President Obama and the Republican leadership in Congress, the fast-track bill is still alive. Its passage depends on whether a handful of Senate Democrats can be persuaded to go along. [..]

Republicans have tried to frame the legislative situation as a fair trade-off: if they can get their reluctant caucus to vote for adjustment assistance, Democrats are somehow honor-bound to support the whole package. (Republicans don’t like TAA both because of its budget impact and their ideological belief that the free market will take care of displaced workers.)

But if Democrats fall for this ploy, they are dupes. For starters, the money in TAA is a pittance, compare to the direct damage that this deal will do to American workers. And it does nothing to protect consumers and citizens from the other elements of the deal that weaken regulatory standards.

Trade Adjustment Assistance is not really about doing much for workers. Mainly, it’s about giving Democrats who are in bed with corporate elites some political cover. The cover is pretty threadbare.

Robert Reich: How to Punish Bank Felons

What exactly does it mean for a big Wall Street bank to plead guilty to a serious crime? Right now, practically nothing.

But it will if California’s Santa Cruz County has any say. [..]

The county’s board of supervisors just voted not to do business for five years with any of the five banks felons.

The county won’t use the banks’ investment services or buy their commercial paper, and will pull its money out of the banks to the extent it can.

“We have a sacred obligation to protect the public’s tax dollars and these banks can’t be trusted. Santa Cruz County should not be involved with those who rigged the world’s biggest financial markets,” says supervisor Ryan Coonerty.

The banks will hardly notice. Santa Cruz County’s portfolio is valued at about $650 million.

But what if every county, city, and state in America followed Santa Cruz County’s example, and held the big banks accountable for their felonies?

What if all of us taxpayers said, in effect, we’re not going to hire these convicted felons to handle our public finances? We don’t trust them.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney: If we don’t change our permissive gun laws, we’ll never end gun violence

Over the past few months, I’ve introduced three gun safety bills and fought for a proposal by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to keep cop-killing bullets off the street.

The ATF’s proposal was shelved before its comment period even ended because of the uproar from the gun lobby and its allies in Congress, and my own proposals have triggered a wave of invectives and false attacks in an attempt to get me to back down and scare off others from supporting responsible gun safety reforms. [..]

I’m doing this because more children die in the United States from bullets than from cancer, and it’s a scandal that the federal government hasn’t done more.

But instead of a reasoned and measured debate about how to reduce gun violence, the response has been an onslaught of gun-obsessed fanatics who strongly – and wrongly – believe that the second amendment guarantees unregulated access to anything that anyone might wish to add to their own personal arsenal. The armchair-constitutionalists among them can make the case against pretty much any regulation of guns, and the courts be dammed.

Maybe it was white rage that provoked a young man to kill nine innocent worshipers as they prayed. Maybe it was mental illness or some other twisted motivation. The one thing about which there can be no debate is that he had a gun.

The gun is what ties the unspeakable atrocity in Charleston, S.C., to the long and apparently never-ending list of mass shootings in this country. We know them by their place names-Newtown, Aurora, Tucson, Virginia Tech, Columbine, Navy Yard. They rivet the nation’s attention for days or weeks-then they fade, and we do nothing. Perhaps this time will be different. I want to be hopeful, but I’m not optimistic. [..]

What we can do, if we have the will, is make it harder for those who want to kill innocents to obtain firearms. After 20 young children were massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Congress took up two modest pieces of legislation: a ban on military-style assault weapons, which no hunter needs; and a requirement for universal background checks before buying guns. Both had overwhelming public support. Neither became law.

Can this time be different? Only if we hold Congress, Obama and the presidential candidates of both parties accountable. Only if we remember Mother Emanuel.

Isaiah Poole: Not Colorblind, Just Plain Blind, To The Roots Of Racist Terror

It was not a matter of if, but from where, some disgusting and barbaric reaction would come to Wednesday night’s terror attack at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. in which nine people died. Not surprisingly, Fox News was among the first out of the gate.

The “No More Mister Nice Blog” captured a segment Fox and Friends aired this morning in which the shooting was branded as an “attack on faith.”

“It didn’t matter that, by the time of the broadcast, the police chief of Charleston had already declared the shooting a hate crime, or that a reporter had interviewed a survivor who said that the shooter had told victims, ‘You rape our women and are taking over our country and you have to go,'” the blog author wrote. “The prime directive on Fox & Friends was not to report the truth – it was to establish a counternarrative that shifts blame away from Fox’s ideological allies and toward Fox’s ideological enemies.”

If some of the other writing of the right – and there was actually remarkably little from the right-wing media that I saw as of mid-afternoon Thursday – was less hell-bent on driving a narrative counter to the plain facts of the case that a white supremacist went into a historically African-American church known for its civil rights advocacy and for that reason killed nine people, it was certainly notable that the coverage steered clear from any notion of a connection between the incident and America’s continuing legacy of racism and violence.

Andrew J. Bacevich: Washington in Wonderland: Down the Iraqi Rabbit Hole (Again)

There is a peculiar form of insanity in which a veneer of rationality distracts attention from the madness lurking just beneath the surface. When Alice dove down her rabbit hole to enter a place where smirking cats offered directions, ill-mannered caterpillars dispensed advice, and Mock Turtles constituted the principal ingredient in Mock Turtle soup, she experienced something of the sort.

Yet, as the old adage goes, truth can be even stranger than fiction. For a real-life illustration of this phenomenon, one need look no further than Washington and its approach to national security policy. Viewed up close, it all seems to hang together. Peer out of the rabbit hole and the sheer lunacy quickly becomes apparent.

Consider this recent headline: “U.S. to Ship 2,000 Anti-Tank Missiles To Iraq To Help Fight ISIS.” The accompanying article describes a Pentagon initiative to reinforce Iraq’s battered army with a rush order of AT-4s. A souped-up version of the old bazooka, the AT-4 is designed to punch holes through armored vehicles.

Taken on its own terms, the decision makes considerable sense. Iraqi forces need something to counter a ]fearsome new tactic http://www.theguardian.com/wor… of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS): suicide bombers mounted in heavily armored wheeled vehicles. Improved antitank capabilities certainly could help Iraqi troops take out such bombers before they reach their intended targets. The logic is airtight. The sooner these weapons get into the hands of Iraqi personnel, the better for them-and so the better for us.

As it turns out, however, the vehicle of choice for ISIS suicide bombers these days is the up-armored Humvee. In June 2014, when the Iraqi Army abandoned the country’s second largest city, Mosul, ISIS acquired 2,300 made-in-the-U.S.A. Humvees. Since then, it’s captured even more of them.

In our new film series, some of the smartest thinkers of our time warn that the runaway national security state, and the endless war and surveillance that underpins it, is creating a more perilous world.

So why aren’t these issues being discussed by the 2016 presidential candidates? How come new ideas about national security aren’t part of the platforms being debated? When will candidates start devising smart, compassionate solutions, not the same old militaristic pathways that, this century alone, have cost over one million human lives, trillions of dollars, and driven a global surge of violence?

Too many candidates are endorsing the conventional political wisdom that more military invasion, occupation, droning and Pentagon spending will somehow make us more secure.

That’s why we think that now is a more important time than ever to challenge the status quo.

Scott Lemieux: The supreme court is right: Confederate flag license plates aren’t free speech

Most states, including some very conservative ones, prefer not to give their endorsement to white supremacist symbols – though there are notable exceptions, like South Carolina, that infamously prefer to display the Confederate flag on state property. On Thursday, appropriately enough, a slim majority of the US supreme court ruled that Texas was not required to give its imprimatur to the Confederate flag. [..]

In a 5-4 ruling – with the four Democratic nominees joined, interestingly, by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court’s only African American member – the court held that Texas was not required to issue the pro-Confederate plate design. This is not an easy case, but the Court’s opinion is probably right. [..]

Individuals have the right to express hateful ideas in public, but the state is not required to endorse them. Either way, state governments, like individuals, are allowed to determine the content of the messages they wish to send. If one wants the state to send better messages, the solution is to elect better public officials.

Robert Reich: Making the Economy Work for The Many and Not the Few #10: End Mass Incarceration, Now.

Imprisoning a staggering number of our people is wrong. The way our nation does it is even worse. We must end mass incarceration, now.

If I’m walking down the street with a Black or Latino friend, my friend is way more likely to be stopped by the police, questioned, and even arrested. Even if we’re doing the exact same thing–he or she is more likely to be convicted and sent to jail.

Unless we recognize the racism and abuse of our criminal justice system and tackle the dehumanizing stereotypes that underlie it, our nation – and our economy – will never be as strong as it could be.

Please take a moment to watch the accompanying video, and please share it so others can understand what’s at stake for so many Americans.

Julia Craven: Racism Is Not A Mental Illness

An act of terrorism unfolded on American soil last night when Dylann Roof allegedly killed nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

The victims were attending a Wednesday night Bible study. Roof reportedly sat in on this service for about an hour before going on a shooting rampage. His intention was “to shoot black people” — a plot that had been in the works for at least six months. Sylvia Johnson, a relative of one of the victims, said Roof told his targets, “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”  [..]

When white people go on shooting sprees, their actions are frequently attributed to mental illness and, thus, they’re not considered fully accountable for the harm they’ve inflicted. This narrative — which is not afforded to people of color — feeds into the assumption that incidents like what happened at Emanuel AME Church are isolated tragedies executed by lone gunmen. Essentially, it excuses the system that allows racialized terrorism to keep happening.

This time it’s different.

Mass shootings have become a banal fact of death in America. (Last year there were 283 incidents in which four or more people were shot.) The nation as a whole, meanwhile, has become newly sensitised to racial violence, with growing activism around police shootings. In April video of a white policeman shooting Walter Scott – an unarmed African American – eight times in the back in as he ran away in North Charleston, South Carolina, went viral.

But the shooting of nine black church-goers in Charleston (not far from where Scott was killed) by a white gunman in what police are treating as a “hate crime” marks a doubling down on the nation’s twin pathologies of racism and guns. Both are deeply rooted in the nation’s history since its founding: neither are going anywhere soon.

New York Times Editorial Board: A Rebuke to Military Tribunals

In 2008, Ali al-Bahlul, a propagandist for Al Qaeda who has been held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since early 2002, was convicted by the military tribunal there and sentenced to life in prison. But officials had no evidence that Mr. Bahlul was involved in any war crimes, so they charged him instead with domestic crimes, including conspiracy and material support of terrorism.

Last Friday, a panel of the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., reversed Mr. Bahlul’s conspiracy conviction because, it said, the Constitution only permits military tribunals to handle prosecutions of war crimes, like intentionally targeting civilians. (The court previously threw out the other charges on narrower grounds.) [..]

The appellate panel’s majority agreed. If the government were to prevail, Judge David Tatel wrote in concurrence, “Congress would have virtually unlimited authority to bring any crime within the jurisdiction of military commissions – even theft or murder – so long as it related in some way to an ongoing war or the armed forces.”

America’s civilian courts are not just the constitutionally proper place to try federal crimes, Judge Tatel added, they are very good at it. “Federal courts hand down thousands of conspiracy convictions each year, on everything from gun-running to financial fraud to, most important here, terrorism.”

Dave Johnson: Walmart’s Huge Tax Dodge

A new report released Wednesday that Walmart is dodging taxes by stashing $76 billion of profits outside of the country using 78 subsidiaries in 15 tax havens raises a question: Why is Congress and the White House considering policies that reward tax dodgers like this?

You may have heard that Walmart pays its workforce so little that they qualify for government assistance like food stamps and Medicaid. That costs taxpayers billions (and raising their minimum pay to only $9 per hour isn’t going to change that very much).

You may have heard that the Walmart heirs have more wealth than 42 percent of Americans combined. That was a 2012 figure – it has only gotten worse since.

You may have heard that the Walmart heirs helped finance an effort to cut estate taxes in 2006. That cost taxpayers billions.

Now we hear that Walmart and the Walton hairs are not only getting billions in tax subsidies like these – they also dodge paying taxes on their profits.

Jeff Biggers: Pope’s encyclical links climate and migration crises

New message urges dialogue that recognizes climate migration as a long-term reality

Among the various revelatory aspects of Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change, released to the public today, one of the overlooked warnings buried in the nearly 200-page document could trigger a new dialogue on another urgent global crisis: migration.

In the encyclical’s first chapter, the pope’s greatly anticipated letter recognizes the “tragic rise” of immigrants fleeing poverty from environmental ruin in an age of climate change.

Declaring that refugees who have yet to be recognized by international governing bodies “bear the loss” of abandonment, the pope calls out the “widespread indifference” to “these tragedies” taking place around the world. Importantly, the letter cites the environmental effects of the “enormous consumption of some rich countries” and its repercussions on the farming practices in the poorest places on earth, notably in Africa.