Tag: Punting the Pundits

In principle, Saturday’s vote to keep the government open should be the perfect curtain-raiser for the political debates between now and the 2016 election. As their price for averting a government shutdown, Republicans demanded and got a gutting of one of the most important provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act, preventing banks from speculating with government insured money. [..]

So a terrific debate is set in motion for the next two years, smoking out which side the Republicans are really on. Right?

Well, no.

If only. For in the great budget sellout of December 2014, fully 57 House Democrats voted with the Republicans to narrowly pass this deal. Key Senate Democrats close to Wall Street, such as Chuck Schumer of New York, were its enablers.

In the end game, President Obama, continuing his signature fighting style, blinked first. He evidently feared that another government shutdown would be blamed more on him than on the Republicans; or that even worse would be in store after January. The Republicans, once again, played chicken and prevailed.

Jeff Bachman: From Torturing to Killing Innocent People: This Is Who We Are

Following the long awaited release of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s “Committee Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” President Barack Obama proclaimed, “Throughout our history, the United States of America has done more than any other nation to stand up for freedom, democracy, and the inherent dignity and human rights of people around the world. At the same time, some of the actions that were taken were contrary to our values.” [..]

I include these lengthy remarks because this is not an analysis of the findings detailed in the torture report. There are plenty of articles that detail such analysis. Rather, this is a call for an end to the high-minded, sanctimonious rhetoric that we are constantly bombarded with. I am tired of listening to our officials say things that are simply and obviously in direct contradiction with what we actually do. Enough is enough. It is time to stop pretending we are something that we are not.

President Obama claimed that some of the actions that were taken (note past tense), were contrary to our values. What seems to be lost on the President is that values are not something one professes; values are established through one’s actions

Alex Gourevitch and Corey Robin: The New Republic dug its own grave

The magazine’s centrist-neoliberal politics embraced forces that eventually destroyed it

“When intellectuals can do nothing else they start a magazine,” socialist critic Irving Howe, an erstwhile contributor to The New Republic, said. If he’s right, what does it mean when that magazine dies? That intellectuals have something else to do? Or that it’s no longer an intellectual magazine?

In the last week, The New Republic has seen a wave of resignations – two-thirds of the names on the masthead, at last count – in response to the decision of owner Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, to push out editor Franklin Foer and, with the help of new CEO Guy Vidra, transform the magazine into a “vertically integrated digital media company.” What that transformation amounts to, no one can say, but many observers have declared the publication dead. And though the magazine’s ex-staffers insist they are not averse to the imperatives of the market or demands of new media, they have labeled the overhaul a victory of clickbait over content, commerce over culture. [..]

But the oft-observed irony that the magazine has been buried by the very class it was meant to contain is no irony at all. For The New Republic had a hand in its undoing. One of the forces that gave the magazine ballast was the left’s messy social movements and collective struggles, which its editors so often tried to hold at bay. Though the magazine claimed to “believe in a capitalism that is democratically regulated,” as its editors opined in 2011, it frequently sought to exorcise the very voices-such as the Occupy movement-that brought the “democracy” to that “regulated capitalism”

Dustin Axe: Ferguson: Revolution, Democracy, and Empire

Many people might be shocked and even appalled to see such a fervent national reaction to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. There have not only been weeks of demonstrations and marches around the nation but Ferguson itself experienced days of rioting. Corporate media outlets have covered protests in places like New York, Boston, Chicago, and Oakland with enthusiasm, and Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama have each spoken extensively about it. Media coverage and national outrage have also brought to light other killings of black people at the hands of police, events that might not otherwise get attention. The choke hold death of Eric Garner and the shooting death of Tamir Rice have each received considerable amount of coverage.

Why did the killing of one black man by a white police officer, Darren Wilson, trigger such a severe reaction? After all, events like this are regular occurrences. [..]

We are witnessing the legacy of both slavery and segregation, and we are experiencing a well established new racial caste system. Africans were bought and sold by the millions to work on colonial plantations, and our nation’s founding documents preserved slavery as an institution. When the Constitution was ratified black people were considered to be three fifth of a person, not real human beings. When the Civil War ended and slavery was outlawed, it was not entirely clear socially, politically or economically what would happen to the 4 million newly freed slaves. The answer was Jim Crow. Black people were free from chains but they were not free from a racial caste system that segregated them from whites. A considerable amount of equality was gained because of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s, however, widespread discrimination and segregation continue today in a new form.

The United States tortures.

That much became undeniably clear this week when the Senate Intelligence Committee released the executive summary (pdf) of it’s report on the CIA’s interrogation and detention program under the Bush administration. [..]

After taking office in 2009 President Obama did ban the use of torture through an executive order, and to this day says that the practice was inconsistent with our values as a nation. But that one stroke of the pen doesn’t match up with the rest of his actions.

The ethos of this administration has been to look forward and not backwards. This has meant letting the architects of the Bush torture regime escape prosecution and any semblance of accountability despite clear violations of international law.

Robert L. Brosage: The Budget Deal: This Is Who They Are

The first signs of the November election returns are apparent in the $1 trillion spending bill that the House of Representatives passed last night in Washington.

This spending bill was forged with resurgent Republicans on their best behavior. They are still a minority in the Senate in the lame-duck session. Their leaders exercised adult supervision over the wingnuts, rejecting calls for a government shutdown over immigration because Obama. They largely adhered to the budget deal cut last year on spending limits, and agreed to fund the government for the remainder of the fiscal year through next October (with the exception of Homeland Security because Obama), putting off real changes until they assume the majority in the new Congress next year.

But good behavior and adult supervision didn’t stop them from adding revealing signature riders and last-minute deals. Consider these the early slush of the coming Republican winter, the first returns on investment for their donors. Tucked into the 1,603-page bill to fund the government — that no legislator will read — are cankerous riders, foreshadowing what is to come. They couldn’t help themselves; this is who they are.

Eugene Robinsom: Answering Evil With Evil

The “debate” over torture is almost as grotesque as torture itself. There can be no legitimate debate about the intentional infliction of pain upon captive and defenseless human beings. The torturers and their enablers may deny it, but they know-and knew from the beginning-that what they did was obscenely wrong.

We relied on legal advice, the torturers say. We were just following orders. We believed the ends justified the means. It is nauseating to hear such pathetic excuses from those who, in the name of the United States, sanctioned or committed acts that long have been recognized as war crimes. [..]

Why would the CIA officer in charge of the program destroy all videotapes of waterboarding sessions? Why would the agency fight the Senate investigators so fiercely, at one point hacking into the committee’s computers? Why would there be such a coordinated attempt by torture’s apologists to steer the “debate” toward subsidiary questions and away from the central issue?

There is only one answer: They decided to answer evil with evil, rather than justice. And they knew it was wrong.

David Sirota: Are Charter Schools Segregating America’s Education System?

Charter schools are often promoted as a tool to address educational inequities, but a potential precedent-setting legal case launched earlier this month says the opposite. In filings with the U.S. Department of Education, two Delaware nonprofit groups allege that some of the state’s publicly funded, privately managed schools are actively resegregating the education system-and in a way that violates federal civil rights law.

The complaint, by the Delaware branch of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Community Legal Aid Society, cites data showing that more than three-quarters of Delaware’s charter schools are “racially identifiable”-a term that describes schools whose demographics are substantially different from the surrounding community.

According to the complaint, “High-performing charter schools are almost entirely racially identifiable as white” while “low-income students and students with disabilities are disproportionately relegated to failing charter schools and charter schools that are racially identifiable as African-American or Hispanic.”

The Senate torture report released on Tuesday has led to the inevitable calls for prosecution of the government officials who may have committed crimes. Although the Justice Department this week reaffirmed its earlier position that it would not be prosecuting anyone, that leaves a burning question open: why not? [..]

Former Bush administration officials, such as John Rizzo, Dick Cheney and John Yoo, continue to argue either that the acts weren’t torture, or that they didn’t know they were, or that even if they were, they were necessary to prevent another attack.

The Senate report released this week provides a powerful, detailed response citing the CIA’s own documents that should put those arguments to rest. Still, if US officials tortured people, and we know torture is, was and always has been illegal, why isn’t the government prosecuting them?

Maybe there’s some complicated legal reason that isn’t obvious to most of us why the evidence wouldn’t hold up in court. If so, it’s in the government’s interest to explain what that is.

Joe Firestsone: The Lawless Society

The release of the Senate’s torture report reminds us of the central fact of American society, today. Any semblance of equal justice under the law is now gone from what our leaders claim is the world’s leading democracy.

Instead, of a constitutional democracy living under the law. We have a gangster government that fails to enforce the law, but instead prosecutes whistle blowers who make public, violations of it. Here is an off the top of the head list of our continuing and systematic failures to create justice. [..]

This is a crime wave composed of wholesale obstruction of justice. If we can’t end it, then democracy will be gone for good. And, if we take too long to end it, then “the beatings will continue” with much suffering among the vast majority of people.

On the other hand, ending the crime wave won’t be easy, because as we see from my list it results as much from political decisions not to enforce the law, as it does from the violations of law themselves. But this brings us to the political system and its present state of dynamics, which only very rarely results in outcomes that represent the public interest. One of our major parties seems completely consumed by the need to serve financial, defense industry, civil suppression and war making, energy, health industry, and other elites, While the other seems to be a bit less consumed by the need, but also very afraid of acting in ways that are hostile to what they want.

David Cay Johnston: America should be more like Disneyland

The country needs Walt Disney’s optimism and investment in infrastructure and human happiness

America in the 1950s was a land of boundless expectations about the future. We built the interstate highway system, created NASA and invested in middle-class prosperity. It was not the nation of today, in which the commonwealth crumbles around us, while powerlessness and hopelessness define millions of people’s lives.

To get some perspective on what was, what is and what could be, I flew west to spend a day at the original Disneyland in Anaheim, California, for the first time in 25 years.

Were Disneyland a person, it would be eligible next month to take funds out of a retirement account, yet after almost six decades, in which more than 600 million visitors walked down Main Street and over the moat to Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, it still looks brand new. Indeed, it looks better than that hot Monday, July 18, 1955, when my Norwegian grandmother and I were among the first paying visitors. [..]

We pay a huge price for our lack of investment and faith in the future of America. We pay for all the inefficiency of our decrepit infrastructure. We pay with minds that will never be fully developed and with scientific breakthroughs that will enrich other countries. And we pay with lives of daily grind and unpleasantness without hope of respite.

Would that as a people we thought like Walt Disney so we could make America into a happy place.

John Feffer: America Held Hostage

The United States recently conducted a raid in Yemen to free an American hostage. The raid failed. The Navy Seals killed 11 people, including a 10-year-old boy. The kidnappers executed the hostage, journalist Luke Somers. They also killed South African teacher Pierre Korkie. The South African was on the verge of being released as part of a hostage negotiation that the U.S. government didn’t know about.

Somers, meanwhile, was not the subject of any negotiations. The United States has a longstanding policy not to pay ransoms and not to negotiate with terrorists.

Except that sometimes the United States does pay ransom. And sometimes it does negotiate with terrorists. Consistency is the hobgoblin of little countries: Superpowers can do whatever they wish. But the United States enjoys only the illusion of free rein. In fact, America is held hostage by the very way it conducts its foreign policy.

And it’s been that way since the dawn of America’s engagement with the world.

It’s been six years since Wall Street’s recklessness and criminal fraud caused trillions of dollars in economic damage and nearly shattered the global economy. The 2008 financial crisis opened millions of Americans’ eyes to the widespread corruption and mismanagement in the financial industry, and built public support for stronger bank oversight. Initial steps were taken in that direction, primarily in the Dodd/Frank financial reform bill, and more remains to be done.

But today Wall Street is on the offensive. Banks are expanding their political influence, fighting to roll back the measures already in place and working to block further reforms. In our money-driven political system, they have plenty of ammunition with which to wage their battle. [..]

This week its allies were trying to kill a Dodd/Frank provision designed to reduce the need for future big-bank bailouts. Negotiators seeking to avert a government shutdown had inserted a provision into the compromise agreement that would once again allow the country’s too-big-to-fail banks to gamble on derivatives — the exotic financial instruments that helped precipitate the last crisis — with funds that are insured by taxpayers.

Bill Boyarsky: We Have to Change the Way We Report on Rape

One of the important questions raised by Rolling Stone’s University of Virginia rape story is how journalists write about the victims. [..]

One day, we may know more about what happened at the University of Virginia. Investigations, lawsuits and persistent journalists will probably make sure of that.

But what won’t be settled is how journalists should approach rape victims and write about them as we enter a time when their stories are no longer automatically dismissed.

These are ordinary people who normally are not in the news and who may never have encountered a reporter. A practiced reporter knows how to get them to talk, how to use the tricks of the journalism trade.

Smile. Look understanding. Be friendly. Or, if you sense weakness, be intimidating. Explain to them that they’ll help others by telling their stories. Or that it’s their chance to get their side out to a skeptical world, to clear their name. Appeal to their vanity, to their desire for even a brief whirl at celebrity.

But what we don’t do is warn these innocents of how dangerous it can be to talk to us.

Sandeep Jauhar: Don’t Homogenize Health Care

IN American medicine today, “variation” has become a dirty word. Variation in the treatment of a medical condition is associated with wastefulness, lack of evidence and even capricious care. To minimize variation, insurers and medical specialty societies have banded together to produce a dizzying array of treatment guidelines for everything from asthma to diabetes, from urinary incontinence to gout. [..]

But the effort to homogenize health care presumes that we always know which treatments are best and should be applied uniformly. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The evidence for most treatments in medicine remains weak. In the absence of good evidence recommending one treatment over another, trying to stamp out variation in care is irrational.

Even in my field, cardiology, a paragon of evidence-based medicine, most treatment recommendations are based on expert opinions, not randomized controlled trials. Rarely is there one best option.

As I write, New York City is witnessing its fifth day of demonstrations after a Staten Island grand jury’s decision not to indict a police officer in the Eric Garner killing. Those demonstrations followed on the protests across the country over the police shootings of Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old father of two who was slain while walking with his girlfriend in Brooklyn, Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy shot by a rookie Cleveland police officer while playing with a toy gun, and, most famously, the Ferguson, Missouri, police killing of Michael Brown. Conservatives joined liberals in denouncing the grand jury’s outrageous decision in the Garner case. Demonstrations have spread across the country as people of all races have taken up Garner’s plea: “I can’t breathe.” [..]

The deaths of Garner, Brown and others at the hands of police are not the only cause sparking mass protests. The day after the Garner demonstrations started, low-wage workers walked off their jobs in more than 190 cities, demanding a living wage and the right to organize. They, too, chanted, “I can’t breathe.” Workers from fast food-restaurants such as McDonald’s were joined by those from low-wage retail and convenience stores and airline service jobs. In Washington, federal contract workers joined the march, calling on the president to issue procurement regulations that would reward good employers that pay a living wage with benefits and allow workers to organize and bargain collectively.

Kristen Breitweiser: 3 Thoughts on Torture Following the Release of the SSCI Report on Torture 2014

First, there is much talk about the impact that the release of this report will have on our allies, interests, and agents here and overseas. Secretary of State John Kerry, Republicans, and various intelligence officials have all registered their concern: this will inflame, incite, and encourage attacks against Americans and our allies.

Does anyone really think ISIS, al Qaeda, etc. are actually paying such close attention?

If so, then we have a question for Secretary of State Kerry and all the others: Why haven’t you considered the potential impact of a completely different kind of message — the kind of message that would be sent by actually holding accountable all those named in this Torture Report? [..]

If we as a nation do not demand accountability for the truth revealed in this report, then how can we ever make sure that such immoral, illegal, evil acts (or worse) will not be repeated in the future? Accountability sets a strong and undeniable deterrence factor. You commit torture, you go to jail. You go rogue, you go to jail. Simple as that. No gray area. No legalese. No exoneration. No pardon. J A I L.

Thirteen long years later, it’s time we find our moral compass and our conscience again. Because the United States of America–is and should always be a nation of laws.

Lauren Carasik: No guarantee the US won’t torture again

Washington’s reckoning begins, not ends, with release of Senate report

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s release on Tuesday of its much-anticipated torture report, which chronicles the Central Intelligence Agency’s “Rendition, Detention and Interrogation” program in the aftermath of 9/11, has unleashed a cascade of recriminations that threatens to eclipse the committee’s stark findings.  The portion of the report that was released – the 480-page executive summary – paints a haunting picture of brutality that shocks the conscience, and demolishes the myth that torture was effective, limited in scope and only perpetrated by a few rogue actors. Instead, the report reveals the brutal, systematic and sanctioned nature of the program.   [..]

The report failed to provide an overarching analysis of how U.S. policy became so unmoored from its moral groundings and to erode impunity that has shielded both the U.S. operatives who tortured people and their superiors. Its narrow focus on the CIA’s misdeeds did, however, insulate many of the nation’s political leaders, including some who did not relinquish their roles in the previous administration, whose consciences should be heavy. While the report’s findings constitute clear violations of domestic and international law, the committee did not analyze the program’s legality. Given these failings, the report should signal the beginning, not the end, of Washington’s reckoning.

Even today’s partial release – the full 6,000-page report, which cost taxpayers $40 million and took nearly six years to complete, is still classified – was hamstrung by months of negotiations between the CIA, President Barack Obama’s administration and the committee, headed by Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. Feinstein has been under intense pressure to release the report, especially since the impending Republican control of the Senate and the Intelligence Committee left the report’s future disclosure in doubt.

John Nichols: Why Dick Cheney Is Wrong About the CIA Torture Memos

The Senate Intelligence Committee had to release details on its multi-year investigation into how, under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the Central Intelligence Agency employed tactics that the world understands as torture. A decision to sit on the findings of what the 500-plus-page summary of the report begins by describing as a “brutal” and “flawed” program that was “in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values” would have put senators who are elected to serve and advance the public interest at odds with a basic American premise: the idea that a government acting in the name of the American people must regularly seek and obtain their informed consent. [..]

With Cheney taking the lead, the former administration aggressively and repeatedly rejected the principles of transparency and accountability that are essential to maintaining not just national honor but meaningful democracy. And the assault continues, as Cheney, in particular, maintains the pattern of denial and defense that characterized his tenure as the most powerful-and secretive-vice president in American history

Spreading bad policing models to Latin America can only exacerbate inequality and state violence

When a young activist named Diego Ibáñez, a native of Bolivia, sprayed New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton with fake blood at a Times Square rally on Nov. 24, it wasn’t just about the deaths of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner on Staten Island in New York.

Ibáñez was drawing attention to the export of violent police practices from New York to Latin America by consulting firms that employ Bratton and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Through their alliance with criminologist George Kelling of the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, Bratton and Giuliani have been preaching the broken-windows policing gospel to mayors and police departments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela. [..]

But in reality broken-windows policing, which does nothing to address the causes of crime, such as systemic poverty, is primarily designed to allow promising downtown spaces to gentrify for economic development and turns peripheral areas, where poverty is concentrated, into mini police states where all residents are potential suspects.

Robert Kuttner: Still an American Dilemma

What happens to a dream deferred?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

That was the poet Langston Hughes, in 1951. In that year, more than half a century ago, the most basic dreams of African Americans were deferred. Segregation was mandatory in the old South. Discrimination was legal everywhere in America, whether in housing, education, or employment. Blacks were not just separated, but isolated, marginalized, restricted to the worst jobs and most dilapidated neighborhoods, the most dismal schools.

For many, the racism just sagged, like a heavy load. It destroyed hope that hard work would be rewarded. The deferred dreams of that era seldom produced explosions, because the state had a very efficient system of terror. Blacks who resisted were likely to be lynched, jailed, or otherwise destroyed. [..]

We have gone utterly backwards since the 1960s, a time when the Justice Department and the courts vigorously interceded to protect the right to vote. Now, the right to vote is being taken away and rightwing courts are tying the Justice Department’s hands.

We need a broad movement once again, to force government’s hand. As Dr. King appreciated in the last year of his life, it needs to be a movement for economic justice as well as civil rights, a multi-racial movement. Only when there is common appreciation that whites and blacks are common victims of an economic system that delivers all the gains to the top do we have a prayer of mobilizing the whole nation to demand action.

Dean Baker: Benefits of Obamacare: More People Are Able to Work Less

There continues to be enormous confusion over Obamacare. Contrary to claims about the American people being stupid, the confusion is starting at the top. Last week U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-New York), the third-ranking Democrat in the U.S. Senate, complained that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would only help a relatively small number of people, most of whom don’t even vote. For this reason he argued that the Democrats made a mistake in pushing through the ACA and should have instead focused on the economy. [..]

The ACA is far from perfect. It would have been much better to have a universal Medicare system, or at least have a public option, but it was a huge step forward not only because it insured millions of previously uninsured people but, even more importantly, because it freed tens of millions of workers from dependence on their employers for insurance. This is especially important for workers who have serious health conditions or have family members with serious health conditions.

It is striking that Sen. Schumer seems so ill-informed about the impact of the ACA. It is important that the rest of the public know more about the ACA than Schumer, both so that they can take advantage of its benefits and so that they can work to improve it.

Robert Reich: Wall Street’s Democrats

In Washington’s coming budget battles, sacred cows like the tax deductions for home mortgage interest and charitable donations are likely to be on the table along with potential cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

But no one on Capitol Hill believes Wall Street’s beloved carried-interest tax loophole will be touched.

Don’t blame the newly elected Republican Congress.

Democrats didn’t repeal the loophole when they ran both houses of Congress from January 2009 to January 2011. And the reason they didn’t has a direct bearing on the future of the party. [..]

Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), one of those who argued against closing it, said the U.S. “shouldn’t do anything” to “make it easier for capital and ideas to flow to London or anywhere else.” As if Wall Street needed an $11 billion annual bribe to stay put.

To find the real reason Democrats didn’t close the loophole, follow the money. Wall Street is one of the Democratic party’s biggest contributors.

The Obama administration is negotiating a huge trade deal. The President promises CEOs he will go against his own party to push its passage. To get this done the corporations are pushing Congress to pass something called Fast Track – a process that essentially pre-approves trade agreements before Congress even reads the agreements for the first time.

President Obama visited the quarterly meeting of the Business Roundtable Wednesday and told the business leaders he will push Congress to pass the massive Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The path to passage for TPP is Congress approving the Fast Track process ahead of time, and the President is working to get Fast Track approved over Democratic objections.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Unseen Heart of the Violence: Eric Garner at the Terminal Point

Death, like life, occurs within an interconnected web of forces. Eric Garner died at a specific place and time, but he was drawn there by those larger unseen forces. So was the officer who took his life.

One of them never left.

The neighborhood where Eric Garner died was near the terminal point for the Staten Island Ferry, which leaves lower Manhattan from a newly-built building on Whitehall Street.

The Whitehall building is a few minutes’ walk from Wall Street, and it shows. Commuters leaving at the end of a downtown workday enter a gleaming and futuristic edifice of steel and glass, a 21st landmark which evokes the preceding century’s enduring faith in the future. [..]

The terminal station on Staten Island is considerably more modest. A small building stands alone against the dock, wedged between a large parking lot and inland waters which are often covered with small whitecaps. The address is 1 Bay Street. The spot where Eric Garner died is just a few minutes’ walk from the ferry terminus, at 202 Bay Street.

Pilgrims would feel less welcome there.

Jim Hightower: Operation Endless War: How Long Must US Troops Stay in Afghanistan?

Only a few months ago, President Barack Obama announced the good news that our combat role in Afghanistan – the longest war in U.S. history – would finally end by New Year’s Day.

Put away that champagne.

A flock of screeching war hawks brought heavy political pressure on Obama to reverse himself. So our troops will stay in that war-ravaged, corrupt, bankrupted, ethnically divided country for at least another year or two.

Amazingly, the hawks argued that Obama shouldn’t “rush” the timeline for training Afghan security forces to defend their own country.

Rush? Hello: IT’S BEEN 13 YEARS!

“Operation Enduring Freedom,” as the government originally dubbed this mess of a military mission, should be renamed “Operation Endless War.”

Glen Sherer: Our Rivers in Trouble

Granville Beach was a secluded swimming hole on a snaky bend of the White River, the ideal place to meet Vermont neighbors on a hot summer day before 2011’s Hurricane Irene. Now, the sandy shore, deep waters overhung with box elders, streamside wildflowers, and the lively buzz of riparian birds and dragonflies are gone. [..]

America’s rivers are changing, and not for the good. Their flows are being altered by global warming’s wildly erratic precipitation shifts: torrential rains, floods and drought.

As climate models predicted decades ago, places that once got lots of rain, now often get more. Since the 1950’s, Northeastern downpours have grown 74 percent heavier. They’re 45 percent heavier in the Midwest, 26 percent heavier in the Southeast, and 21 percent on the Great Plains. Likewise, places that got less rain in past, now see intensifying drought. [..]

This isn’t only a U.S. problem. In 1990 and again in 2012, the primitive Kogi tribe of Colombia, South America broke a centuries-long silence with modern humanity to serve us a warning. Keen observers of nature’s interconnectedness, the Kogi warned that global warming is destroying the earth’s rivers, the web of life, and the Great Earth Mother.

I can’t breathe.

Those were Eric Garner’s last words, and today they apply to me. The decision by a Staten Island grand jury to not indict the police officer who killed him takes my breath away.

In the depressing reality series that should be called “No Country for Black Men,” this sick plot twist was shocking beyond belief. There should have been an indictment in the Ferguson case, in my view, but at least the events that led to Michael Brown’s killing were in dispute. Garner’s homicide was captured on video. We saw him being choked, heard him plead of his distress, watched as no attempt was made to revive him and his life slipped away.

This time, there were literally millions of eyewitnesses. Somebody tell me, just theoretically, how many does it take? Is there any number that would suffice? Or is this whole “equal justice under the law” thing just a cruel joke?

Dave Zirin: Jameis Winston’s Peculiar Kind of Privilege

There are only two conclusions one can draw about Florida State football star quarterback Jameis Winston. Either he is a remarkable athlete who has little comprehension of the world beyond the huddle and hired the most callous attorneys on the planet to beat a sexual assault charge. Or he is a remarkable athlete who carries a deeply embittered streak of misogyny. Jameis Winston is currently facing a Florida State code of conduct hearing over charges of sexual assault. These same allegations were deemed to be without merit by the state’s attorney, although the initial investigation by Tallahassee police was so shady it was worthy of its own New York Times exposé.

Yet whether Winston is guilty or innocent, nothing excuses the testimony-published in USA Today-that the quarterback submitted to the code of conduct hearing this week. In his own defense, the Heisman winner writes, “The only thing as vicious as rape is falsely accusing someone of rape.” Read Daniel Roberts for a searing statistical breakdown for how gobsmackingly ridiculous such a statement actually is. The chances of being falsely accused of rape are about as likely as being struck by lightning: one in 2 million. Meanwhile, 25 percent of women on campus say they have survived a sexual assault. Also, as Roberts writes, many high-profile athletes have survived and even thrived after sexual assault accusations and convictions. Meanwhile, actual survivors of sexual assault are often treated like they deserve any pain that lingers.

David Sirota: A Multi-Billion Dollar Secret

If you are a public school teacher in Kentucky, the state has a message for you: You have no right to know the details of the investments being made with your retirement savings. That was the crux of the declaration issued by state officials to a high school history teacher when he asked to see the terms of the agreements between the Kentucky Teachers’ Retirement System and the Wall Street firms that are managing the system’s money on behalf of him, his colleagues and thousands of retirees.

The denial was the latest case of public officials blocking the release of information about how billions of dollars of public employees’ retirement nest eggs are being invested. Though some of the fine print of the investments has occasionally leaked, the agreements are tightly held in most states and cities. Critics say such secrecy prevents lawmakers and the public from evaluating the propriety of the increasing fees being paid to private financial firms for pension management services.

Nicholas Tampio: David Coleman’s plan to ruin education

In the summer of 2008, David Coleman changed the course of American education. For decades, reformers had argued that the country needed a national standards-based model of education to ensure economic prosperity. He helped make that a reality by convincing Bill Gates to support the Common Core State Standards initiative, to the tune of over $200 million.

In part because of his experience supervising the writing of the standards, Coleman became the head of the College Board, where his philosophy of education will further shape how U.S. high schools prepare students for college.

He has expressed this vision in an essay published by the College Board, “Cultivating Wonder.” With this document and the early results of the Common Core, it’s easy to see where his grand plans fall short. [..]

A recurrent defense of the Common Core is that the standards are good but the implementation has been bad. Even if Coleman’s educational vision is perfectly actualized, it is still profoundly flawed. Under Common Core, from the time they enter kindergarten to the time they graduate from high school, students will have few opportunities to ask their own questions or come up with their own ideas. It’s time for Americans to find alternatives to Coleman’s educational vision.

>/div>