Tag: Punting the Pundits

From my training in law school to my years as a prosecutor, I was taught that Lady Justice draped a blindfold across her eyes because she was a stalwart of equality, remaining impartial in all situations, and judging facts instead of people. I was encouraged to remember this, to practice this, to swallow it whole, and repeat it. As a concept, it was lofty and idealistic. It was noble. The idea that justice was literally blind.

Then came Wednesday’s instant replay of injustice in Staten Island, after a grand jury — the second in less than 10 days — returned a “no true bill” against a white police officer who killed an unarmed black individual. But, unlike Ferguson, this time it was all on tape. And whether you wear a blue uniform or a black robe, make no mistake: this was vile, plain and simple.  [..]

But that’s not the vile part. The vile part is how this case and the Ferguson case were completely mismanaged for the purposes of (not) returning a grand jury indictment.

A grand jury is not responsible for finding guilt or innocence. More importantly, a prosecutor is not responsible for proving someone is guilty before a grand jury. The sole function of a grand jury is very limited and minimal. Is there enough evidence to at least justify an arrest in this case? A “yes” answer does not mean you think the person is guilty. A grand juror can believe a defendant is not guilty of a crime yet still return an indictment. Doing so only means that that there is enough evidence (probable cause) to let both sides have their day in court, to let them argue in front of a judge and jury, with lawyers representing each side, with the right to cross-examine witnesses and tell both sides of the story. In other words, an indictment simply lets justice run its due course.

Jessica Valento: #CrimingWhileWhite is exactly what’s wrong with white privilege

In the wake of protests in Ferguson, Missouri following both the killing of Michael Brown and the grand jury’s refusal to indict the police officer who did it, and the killing of 12 year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio, and the appalling lack of charges in Eric Garner’s homicide at the hands of a New York City police officer, many white people have been asking how, exactly, they can help.

It’s a vital question, and I get it: I want to help, too. I’m just not so sure #CrimingWhileWhite is the best way to do it.

This latest viral hashtag started on Wednesday night after the Garner decision came down and, using it, white people have detailed crimes they’ve committed without much trouble (let alone violence) from authorities. The hashtag is meant to be a glimpse into the incredible world of white privilege, where you can shoplift and get away with it, dine and dash with impunity, tell a cop to fuck off or even have one [drive you to the ATM for bail money https://twitter.com/Dr24hours/… on the way to jail.

John Nichols: Bernie Sanders’s Bold Economic Agenda Seeks to Transform Politics

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders will “make a decision within the first few months of 2015” on whether to bid for the presidency of the United States. It is not certain that he will run. And, if the independent senator from Vermont does decide to run, he says he has yet to determine precisely how he might do so: as a challenger to presumed front-runner Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination or as an insurgent independent taking on both major parties. Sanders has in recent months spent a good deal of time in the first caucus state of Iowa and the first primary state of New Hampshire, and he acknowledges that this has stoked speculation that he is likely to go the Democratic route. He also declares, “I will not play the role of a spoiler”-tipping a fall 2016 race to a right-wing Republican. Yet, the senator expresses deep frustration with the failure of the Democratic Party to adopt positions that are sufficiently progressive and populist to build a movement to change the debate and the direction of the country.

Sanders explained in an interview with The Nation that he is convinced, after visiting not just Iowa and New Hampshire but Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Carolina, Mississippi, California and other states, that “there is a real hunger in grassroots America for a fight against the greed of the billionaire class, which is wrecking havoc on our economic and political system.”

Zoë Carpenter: Can the Military Fix Its Sexual-Assault Problem on Its Own?

After an Army drill sergeant was accused of raping or assaulting a dozen female soldiers while deployed in Afghanistan and in a bathroom at Missouri’s Fort Leonard Wood, it seemed like the military justice system worked the way it was supposed to. The accused, Angel Sanchez, was tried at a court-martial. In September, he was convicted on multiple counts, sentenced to twenty years confinement and given a dishonorable discharge.

But testimony from two of Sanchez’s victims suggested that despite two decades of promises to enforce a “zero tolerance” policy toward sexual assault, the military is still hostile to service members who report sex crimes. One private testified that a high-ranking officer told her company that no one would graduate “if any more sexual assault cases” were reported. Another victim said a Lieutenant Colonel told her and other trainees “not to make any more allegations.” As a result, she said, “I have issues of trusting those who are in charge of me.”

The question of whether the military is doing enough to stamp out not only sex crimes but also retaliation against those who report them was raised again Thursday by the release of a 136-page report by the Department of Defense. The Pentagon estimates that 19,000 service members were assaulted this year, down from 26,000 in 2012. Only one in four of those crimes were reported, though more victims came forward to report assaults than in previous years. About two-thirds said that after reporting crimes against them, they were retaliated against by their superiors or peers.

California raised taxes, Kansas cut them. California did better

Ever since economist Arthur Laffer drew his namesake curve on a napkin for two officials in President Richard Nixon’s administration four decades ago, we have been told that cutting tax rates spurs jobs and higher pay, while hiking taxes does the opposite.

Now, thanks to recent tax cuts in Kansas and tax hikes in California, we have real-world tests of this idea. So far, the results do not support Laffer’s insistence that lower tax rates always result in more and better-paying jobs. In fact, Kansas’ tax cuts produced much slower job and wage growth than in California.

The empirical evidence that the Laffer curve is not what its promoter insists joins other real-world experience undermining the widely held belief that minimum wage increases reduce employment and income.

Steven W. Thrasher: The Eric Garner decision confirms a holiday of horrors. ‘Tis the season for more protest, not less

Pretending that we should keep calm and carry on – that we even can – is a bigger fantasy than Santa Claus

On Wednesday evening in New York City, as dusk fell into night, another grand jury failed to indict another police officer for killing another unarmed black man in America – this one a bona-fide homicide caught on camera. On Wednesday night in New York City, we protest. And then they planned in this same town – on this, the same night in America when the law continued to allow cops to kill black men – to light the most famous Christmas tree in the country. [..]

And, yes, the protesters should be peaceful – but we need to be disruptive. Because the same structural racism exists in New York City that does in Ferguson, as it does everywhere in the United States. As President Obama said on Wednesday night: “This is an American problem.” And no holiday lights should be lit while the light of justice is snuffed out for so many.

Of course nobody wants to watch a mirror image of the violence that erupted in Ferguson fewer than 10 days ago. But the Rockefeller Center tree lighting makes for a primetime-TV image of this country, next to New York’s protest, which is sadly like the surrealism of the Obama-next-to-protests split- and the irony of the Season’s Greetings-banner-over-the-riot-gear-cops photo. It’s a diptych of injustice on steroids.

Seums Milne: Cuba’s extraordinary global medical record shames the US blockade

From Ebola to earthquakes, Havana’s doctors have saved millions. Obama must lift this embargo

Four months into the internationally declared Ebola emergency that has devastated west Africa, ]leads the world in direct medical support http://www.theguardian.com/wor… to fight the epidemic. The US and Britain have sent thousands of troops and, along with other countries, promised aid – most of which has yet to materialise. But, as the World Health Organisation has insisted, what’s most urgently needed are health workers. The Caribbean island, with a population of just 11m and official per capita income of $6,000 (£3,824), answered that call before it was made. It was first on the Ebola frontline and has sent the largest contingent of doctors and nurses – 256 are already in the field, with another 200 volunteers on their way. [..]

But the island is still suffocated by the US trade embargo that has kept it in an economic and political vice for more than half a century. If Barack Obama wants to do something worthwhile in his final years as president he could use Cuba’s role in the Ebola crisis as an opening to start to lift that blockade and wind down the US destabilisation war.

Jessica Valentii: If we truly valued motherhood, we would actually do something to help pregnant women

We’ve all heard the platitudes: Motherhood is the most important job in the world. If mothers made a parenting salary – we’re chefs, chauffeurs, housekeepers and office managers! – we’d be bazillionaires.

Come on. We’re not even willing to let a pregnant woman hold on to a job.

On Wednesday, the US supreme court will hear arguments in a case to decide whether the Pregnancy Discrimination Act requires employers to provide accommodations for pregnant workers. The case stems from former UPS worker Peggy Young, who was put on unpaid leave after her doctor recommended she not lift packages heavier than 20 pounds.

All the Hallmark-card sentiment in the world doesn’t change the reality that whether you’re in the highest court in all the land or at the neighborhood playground, pregnant women get treated like second-class citizens and mothers are expected to “do it all” with little more than a condescending pat on the head.

Glenn Reynolds, aka “Instapundit”, is one of the biggest voices out there trying to integrate “men’s rights activism” with mainstream conservatism. Not that mainstream conservatives have any love for feminism, of course, but the MRA hyper-focus on blaming all the world’s ills on the fact that women won’t meekly submit to male authority as MRAs want them to is a bit much even for some of the biggest anti-choice misogynists on the Republican side of the aisle. But Reynolds keeps pushing and his latest entry, for USA Today, is about accusing feminists, in collusion with Obama, of stealing good jobs from working class men. [..]

The entire piece is a breathtaking work of bad faith, but this might be the worst of it. If anyone in this equation was against government spending to create jobs, it wasn’t the feminists. It was conservatives like Reynolds. Reynolds hates the stimulus package he pretends to defend against the evil, man-hating, job-stealing feminists. But he will pretend to support it in order to attack feminists for mounting a basic criticism of it.

Lindsay Abrams: U.N. climate talks open with a terrifying reminder: We’ve already blown through two-thirds of our carbon budget

As global climate talks kicked off Monday in Lima, Peru, Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, stepped forward to remind delegates of just how much is at stake in the negotiations. The world, Pachauri warned, has already used nearly two-thirds, or 65 percent, of its carbon budget, the approximate amount of greenhouse gases we can emit into the atmosphere if we want to maintain a reasonable chance of remaining below 2 degrees Celsius of warming.

We don’t have much left to work with. And crucially, given the way we’re growing, we’re running short on time: [..]

But it’s worth remembering, now more than ever, that it’s going to take “substantial and sustained” reductions in emissions, on a global level, to keep things from getting much hotter – and to lessen our odds of climate catastrophe:

Falguni A. Sheth: White supremacy lives on: Ferguson decision confirms absence of legal and moral justice

With “no indictment” announced against Darren Wilson, a perverted natural order of things was affirmed. Here’s why

For days, large swaths of the U.S. and the globe waited to hear whether the grand jury would indict Office Darren Wilson. For a week, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon had declared a state of emergency, calling out the National Guard to “maintain peace and protect those exercising their right to free speech.” Today, he repeated the same message.

“Together we are all focused to make sure that the necessary resources are at hand to protect lives, to protect business and to protect free speech.” [..]

The natural order, for Gov. Nixon, is one in which police violence will continue to be seen as “stopping criminals,” and preserving “freedom” for the whites of Ferguson. In the meantime, the black citizens of Ferguson and their supporters across the globe will ascribe an enormous, though rather different, symbolism to the verdict: No indictment confirms the continued absence of legal and, indeed, moral justice.

Yet, it is hard to imagine that even had the grand jury indicted, that their decision would have much of an effect on the institutional, deeply embedded problem of state-endorsed, police-led racial violence in Ferguson, St. Louis or anywhere else in the U.S.

Jessica Valenti: If tech companies wanted to end online harassment, they could do it tomorrow

If someone posted a death threat to your Facebook page, you’d likely be afraid. If the person posting was your husband – a man you had a restraining order against, a man who wrote that he was “not going to rest until [your] body [was] a mess, soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts” – then you’d be terrified. It’s hard to imagine any other reasonable reaction.

Yet that’s just what Anthony Elonis wants you to believe: That his violent Facebook posts – including one about masturbating on his dead wife’s body – were not meant as threats. So on Monday, in Elonis v United States, the US supreme court will start to hear arguments in a case that will determine whether threats on social media will be considered protected speech.

If the court rules for Elonis, those who are harassed and threatened online every day – women, people of color, rape victims and young bullied teens – will have even less protection than they do now. Which is to say: not damn much.

The American people must make a fundamental decision. Do we continue the 40-year decline of our middle class and the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else, or do we fight for a progressive economic agenda that creates jobs, raises wages, protects the environment and provides health care for all? Are we prepared to take on the enormous economic and political power of the billionaire class, or do we continue to slide into economic and political oligarchy? These are the most important questions of our time, and how we answer them will determine the future of our country.

The long-term deterioration of the middle class, accelerated by the Wall Street crash of 2008, has not been pretty. Today, we have more wealth and income inequality than any major country on earth. We have one of the highest childhood poverty rates and we are the only country in the industrialized world which does not guarantee health care for all. We once led the world in terms of the percentage of our people who graduated college, but we are now in 12th place. Our infrastructure, once the envy of the world, is collapsing.

Dean Baker: The Paid Vacation Route to Full Employment

The economics profession has hit a roadblock in terms of being able to design policies that can help the economy. On the one hand we have many prominent economists, like Paul Krugman and Larry Summers, who say the problem is that we don’t have enough demand to get us back to full employment. There is a simple remedy in this story; get the government to spend more money on items like infrastructure, education, and clean energy. [..]

The other side of the professional divide in economics doesn’t have much to offer on full employment because they say we are already there. The argument goes that people have dropped out of the labor force because they would rather not work at the wage their skills command in the market. In this story, we may want to find ways to educate or train people so they have more skills, but unemployment is not really a problem in today’s economy.

The notion that seven million people (the drop in population adjusted employment since the start of the recession) just decided they don’t feel like working, doesn’t pass the laugh test outside of economic departments and corporate boardrooms. This leaves us stuck with a policy prescription — more stimulus — that has zero political prospect any time in the foreseeable future.

Richard Brodsky: Shut It Down: Boehner as Moderate

It’s a sign of how far right the Republican Party has moved that John Boehner is the standard bearer for moderate Republicans. But there’s a new meaning to the word “moderate” that illuminates the new political reality for the GOP and for the country. [..]

Boehner is making no secret of his willingness to throw his weight around to stop what he believes are self-destructive political tactics. His Tea Party wing doesn’t disagree with his policies, they’re infuriated by what looks like civil conversations with Obama and reluctance to use his new majority to slowly redefine the Federal government. Now, if you believe that American liberty and economic prosperity are endangered solely by the Federal government it’s foolish to do anything but shut it down, no matter how unpopular that may be with swing voters. After all you don’t get revolutions by increment, you have to change the paradigm. But the political cost of a shutdown has Wall Street and big donors scared. They’re banking on Boehner to keep tactics out of the headlines.

Dave Johnson: Is the Democratic Party Relevant Anymore?

Many Democrats examining what happened in the 2014 midterms are asking, “What did the voters want?” But the right question is why only 36.4 percent of potential voters bothered to register and vote? Obviously Democrats did not give those voters a good enough reason to take the trouble. Is the Democratic Party relevant anymore? [..]

Democrats were considered the majority party from the time of Roosevelt’s New Deal until the 1980s. All they had to do to win was to get a high-enough voter turnout. Democratic operations were more about getting out the vote (GOTV) than giving people reasons to vote for Democrats instead of Republicans. They just assumed most people agreed with them — because most people agreed with them. But that time has passed.

Contrary to what Barack Obama says about the U.S. being built on the rule of law, the country routinely resorts to official violence and illegality.

Barack Obama looked at his most clueless, responding to the riots and rage in Ferguson, Missouri. He hasn’t seemed so callow since the BP oil spill. Like he just wished it was over and could get on to the delights of his post-presidency. Or back to immigration reform and stalling that damn pipeline.

Using his slow voice, as if he’s explaining something so basic that it’s hard to understand, he declared that the U.S. is a “nation built on the rule of law” and added next day, he has “no sympathy” for those who go violent. The problem with this, at least for those in the streets, is the U.S. is not a nation of laws and resorts to official violence and/or illegality routinely.[..]

Obama and others like pointing to Martin Luther King Jr. as the model for peaceful protest. But King wasn’t a law-abider, he was a lawbreaker. He just did it non-violently, a preferable term to peaceful. His reasons were both pragmatic and principled. There was no way for protesters to match the firepower of the protestees — then or now. But more tellingly: you turn into them if you mirror their methods and then nothing’s been gained. In these protests I heard cries I hadn’t heard in a long time — Revolution! … By any means necessary! That’s not nostalgia, it’s despair, and loss of hope for change by normal, lawful means.

Robert Kuttner: The Cheap Oil Curse

Remember “Peak Oil?” The world was running out of oil, prices would soon skyrocket, and we had better find other fuels.

Well, that argument didn’t work out so well for environmentalists, did it? As oil reserves and those of other carbon fuels became scarce and prices rose, the law of supply and demand kicked in. The industry invested the profits from those higher prices in new technologies, and the oil barons found even more destructive ways to extract oil and gas — by exploiting the muck from tar sands, inventing hydro-fracking, and despoiling Third World sources.

So now, oil is cheaper than it’s been in years, about $66 a barrel. Regular unleaded gasoline can be had for well under $3 a gallon. [..]

Cheap oil, of course, is a curse. It promotes increased use of carbon fuels at a time when we should be investing massively in substitutes. And the apparent plenty of oil and gas takes the spine out of most politicians.

Robert Reich: Patrolling the Boundaries Inside America

America is embroiled in an immigration debate that goes far beyond President Obama’s executive order on undocumented immigrants.

It goes to the heart of who “we” are. And it’s roiling communities across the nation.

In early November, school officials in Orinda, California, hired a private detective to determine whether a seven-year-old Latina named Vivian — whose single mother works as a live-in nanny for a family in Orinda — “resides” in the district and should therefore be allowed to attend the elementary school she’s already been attending there. [..]

The nation’s attention is focused on the border separating the United States from Mexico, and on people who have crossed that border and taken up residence here illegally.

But the boundary separating white Anglo upscale school districts from the burgeoning non-white and non-Anglo populations in downscale communities is fast becoming a flashpoint inside America.

In both cases, the central question is who are “we.”

Now is the time of year when poverty and homelessness are most prominent on the minds of many Americans. As families gather to eat together and give thanks for their lives, many of us also take time to think about the struggles of people who are less fortunate.

Less often do we think or even know about the extreme measures that are used by local lawmakers and police to criminalize the existence of people who are homeless and to target, harass, and drive people living in extreme poverty out of their communities. [..]

Aggressive policing, enforcement, and jailing for these offenses also cost money. That money would be better spent addressing the causes of homelessness, whether through adequately paying work, affordable housing, unemployment benefits, healthcare coverage, or better resources for substance abuse and mental health care, including for veterans with PTSD. At the very least, public spaces should remain public, civil liberties should be upheld even for those without a home, and people who are homeless should have access to basic services instead of being criminalized by restrictive ordinances designed to make them go somewhere else — anywhere else — wherever that might be.

Thor Benson: The Disenfranchisement of American Felons: Caught Once and Left Behind for Good

In many states in America, convicted felons who have done their time do not return to society with a clean slate, as they are barred from participating in the voting process. That’s true even in cases of nonviolent crime or those in which the accused were sentenced only to probation.

Iowa, Kentucky and Florida are three states in which convicted felons lose their voting rights, although Iowa does offer a long and complicated application process they can endure in an attempt to reclaim those rights. Nine other states (pdf) have similarly strict laws that either require a five-year waiting period before voting rights are restored after a completed sentence or deny future participation outright according to a list of specific felonies. An additional 19 states prevent people from voting during their prison term, parole or probation. According to The Sentencing Project, 5.85 million otherwise eligible voters have been disenfranchised by such laws. The history of voter disenfranchisement in America is long, complicated and deeply impacted by racism.

John Nichols: An Inconvenient Political Truth: That St. Louis Prosecutor Is a Democrat

What has not been much discussed is the fact that McCulloch is a Democrat-a member of the same party as President Obama, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon and Congressional Black Caucus chair Marcia Fudge, the Ohioan who on Monday evening referred to the failure to bring charges against Wilson as “a slap in the face to Americans nationwide who continue to hope and believe that justice will prevail.” [..]

As the elected prosecutor in suburban St. Louis County since 1991, McCulloch is a powerful player in Missouri Democratic politics. He has delivered sought-after endorsements to prominent figures such as Claire McCaskill, who had the prosecutor’s support when she challenged a sitting Democratic governor in 2004 and who is now Missouri’s senior senator. In August of this year, McCulloch helped a white challenger mount a successful Democratic primary challenge to St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley, the first African-American to hold the position. On the same day, McCulloch, who is white, easily saw off a Democratic primary challenge from Leslie Broadnax, an African-American attorney and municipal judge. [..]

There was no real chance to defeat McCulloch at the polls in the fall, as he ran without Republican opposition. But thousands of St. Louis County voters refused to vote for the incumbent. [..]

It is important to take primary elections seriously. And it is important to recognize the value of independent and third-party challenges to the two-party status quo.

There is a good argument to be made for electing prosecutors on a nonpartisan bais. But there is an even better argument to be made that elections for prosecutor positions- be they partisan or nonpartisan, be their primaries or general elections-must be recognized as some of the most vital contests on our ballots.

Media and political elites tend to focus on top-of-the-ballot races for president and governor and senator. But, if the experience of Ferguson and St. Louis County teach us anything, it is that at the bottom of the ballot, in races for local law-enforcement posts, the most fundamental choices are made.

George Zornick: Why Chuck Hagel’s Departure Really Matters

The New York Times reported that the United States will expand its mission in Afghanistan in 2015, with US troops participating in direct combat with the Taliban while American airpower backs Afghan forces from above. The shift, leaked anonymously to reporters ahead of a holiday week, is a big “oh, nevermind” to Obama’s very public announcement six months ago in the Rose Garden that US troops in Afghanistan would be shifting into a training and advisory role next year.

The president didn’t even make a glancing reference to the Afghanistan reversal in his remarks announcing Hagel’s departure. The administration would clearly prefer a limited public debate, and based on the media coverage so far, it is getting its wish.

But it is against this new hawkish posture that Hagel’s departure should be understood and discussed. It is possible that it was the subtext to his resignation: Hagel came aboard to help manage a withdrawal from Afghanistan and shrink the Pentagon budget, and an anonymous US official told the Times Monday that “the next couple of years will demand a different kind of focus.”

It is only when you encounter other people’s holiday mythologies that the arbitrary and gross nature of your own become apparent. For a foreigner, Thanksgiving offers a particularly rich array of incomprehensible traditions – all those combinations of sweet and savoury, the 70s provenance of many of the dishes and the fetishisation of the turkey itself. What with that and the root vegetables, by 4pm on Thanksgiving afternoon, to the outsider it can all start to feel a bit Wicker Man – the creepy 1973 original, not the loveably camp Nic Cage remake.

I don’t claim to fully understand this American holiday – I have only lived in the US for seven years. But from my own experience of Christmas, I know too well the hysteria that can be brought on by deviating from the way things have always been done. There was, for instance, my dad’s heroic efforts one year, to suggest that we have steak instead of turkey on Christmas day, a well-meaning but egregious subversion of the first rule of the holidays: nothing is to change, ever. That includes the hour at which one eats, table settings, dress code, TV viewing, side dishes and whether or not you can set foot outside the house during the period of holiday lockdown. (The answer is, of course, always no.)

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Prosecute Now: The Justice Department Can Still Act Against Bad Bankers

It’s been a grim period for American justice. Despite compelling evidence of widespread bank fraud in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis — and despite all those billion-dollar settlements — prosecutors have not indicted executives at any major U.S. bank. This stands in contrast to the much smaller savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, which led to the conviction of more than a thousand bankers.

And as the Justice Department’s criminal division remained idle in the aftermath of 2008, the statute of limitations passed for most of bankers’ crimes.

But there’s a ray of hope: The bankers’ own deep-seated propensity for cheating and corruption may have given prosecutors a new opportunity to indict them. With the upcoming departure of Attorney General Eric Holder, there is the chance to forge a new approach toward Wall Street lawbreaking by pursuing evidence of wrongdoing wherever it may lead.

The stakes are high. As long as the bankers’ culture of corruption goes unpunished, the safety of the global economy — and of individual families’ well-being — remains at risk.

Kwei Quartey: Ebola’s Racial Disparity

The most effective treatment for Ebola might be having white skin.

American healthcare workers Nancy Writebol,  Kent Brantly, Craig Spencer, and Rick Sacra, as well as NBC cameraman Ashoka Mupko, were all beneficiaries of the medical sophistication of the U.S. hospital system.

All of them contracted Ebola in West Africa and lived to tell the tale, emerging from the hospital Ebola-free and appearing remarkably robust. They benefited from early diagnosis, prompt evacuation to the leading U.S. special isolation centers, and in some cases, treatment with convalescent serum and the experimental drug ZMapp.

The story is quite different for some other high-profile Ebola victims.

Martin Salia, a legal and permanent Maryland resident, was the medical director of Sierra Leone’s Kissy United Methodist Hospital and its only full-time physician. As one of a shockingly small number of doctors in that country-a mere 136 for a population of 6 million-Salia was a rare breed of physician capable of treating anything from orthopedic injuries to myocardial infarction. [..]

The physicians who have cared for these patients themselves would deny that any racial bias ever consciously entered into their decisions over choice of therapy. That, however, is exactly the trouble. Most racial bias among doctors is unconscious, meaning we must carefully consider whether our medical decisions reflect a double standard in the treatment of our patients-Ebola-infected or otherwise.

David M. Perry: Playing politics with the disabled

The disabled deserve the chance to work, save and be as independent as they can

The Achieving a Better Life Act (ABLE) is one of those rare good ideas that seem to have a chance of making it through Congress and becoming law. The bill is designed to tweak the tax code so that people on Social Security disability insurance (SSDI) can earn and even save some money without threatening their benefits. [..]

The House version of the bill operates with a narrower definition of disability than the Senate’s – a sign of a deeper political debate about just whom SSDI is supposed to cover. Initially, the House Ways and Means Committee advocated cutting other disability benefits (PDF) to pay for ABLE, potentially playing one group of disabled against another. The powerful right-wing Heritage Foundation has come out against ABLE and listed it as a lame-duck bill to quash.

The pressing need for the passage of ABLE and the rhetoric employed by its detractors illuminates some of the challenges of being disabled or caring for someone who is disabled in 21st century America. For a country whose rhetoric often emphasizes self-reliance and hard work, the status quo is built around limiting the independence of disabled people. But many conservatives seem unwilling to fix the situation for all disabled Americans, preferring to use the disabled as pawns in a political effort to identify and separate the worthy from the unworthy disabled and poor.

In recent days, the press has reported that President Obama signed an order (or on second thought, maybe it’s just an unsigned decision that can’t be FOIAed, so don’t start anything, Jason Leopold) basically halting and partly reversing his plans for withdrawal. [..]

Virtually simultaneously with the decision to permit American forces to be more involved with the Afghan government, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has reversed Hamid Karzai’s ban on night raids – and also renamed them “night operations.” [..]

And now that Obama has made it clear he will spend his Lame Duck continuing – escalating, even – both forever wars he got elected to end, he has fired forced the resignation of the Secretary of Defense he hired to make peace. [..]

Some great reporting from the NYT, getting all three scoops about Obama’s pivot to war.

I’m just hoping someone is reporting out the really important questions: who will be paying for the resumption of the forever war, and how it will be any more successful than the last 13 years?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Rethinking the Cost of Western Intervention in Ukraine

Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the United Nations, recently cautioned Americans against intervention fatigue: “I think there is too much of ‘Oh, look, this is what intervention has wrought’…. one has to be careful about overdrawing lessons.” Say what? Given the calamities wrought in Iraq, Libya and now Ukraine, one would think that a fundamental rethinking and learning of lessons is long overdue. The United States needs a sober look at the actual costs of supposed good intentions divorced from realism.

Power’s comments come as Ukraine marks the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the Maidan Square demonstrations in Kiev, surely an occasion for rethinking and changing course. One year after the United States and Europe celebrated the February coup that ousted the corrupt but constitutionally elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, liberal and neoconservative interventionists have much to answer for. Crimea has been annexed by Russia. More than 4,000 people have lost their lives in the civil war in Ukraine, with more than 9,000 wounded and nearly a million displaced. This month, the Kiev government acknowledged the de facto partition of Ukraine by announcing it was ending all funding for government services and social benefits including pensions and freezing all bank accounts in the eastern districts that are in revolt. The Ukrainian economy is near collapse with nowhere near the billions needed to rebuild it at hand. How Kiev or the cut-off eastern regions will provide heating and electricity to their beleaguered people as winter approaches remains to be seen.

Zoë Carpenter: This Is the Next Big Fight Between Progressives and the Wall Street Dems

If Burger King has its way, the company will soon leave its Miami headquarters for Canada and enter the coffee-and-donut business. When the fast-food giant announced its intention to buy the Canadian company Tim Hortons in August, it stressed the coffee-and-donuts part of the deal-or, rather, the opportunities for “growth” and “expansion.” But the chance to move to a country with lower corporate tax rates was undoubtedly part of the appeal. Since 2003, more than thirty-five American companies have dodged taxes through similar deals, which are known as “corporate inversions.”

Now the Burger King move is implicated in a fight brewing between some Senate Democrats and President Obama, a clash that throws into relief the split between the party’s Wall Street wing and its progressives. One of the people involved in the deal was Antonio Weiss, a major Democratic fundraiser, the publisher of The Paris Review, and the global head of investment banking at Lazard Ltd, a firm that has put together several major inversion deals. As of November 12, he’s also President Obama’s pick to oversee the domestic financial system-including the implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial-reform act, and consumer protection-at the Treasury.

Andrea Palframan: Can a First Nations-led Movement Stop Big Oil?

Can a First Nations-led, people-driven movement really have the power to stop Big Oil?

The folks behind the Pull Together campaign think so. The Pull Together initiative supports First Nations in B.C. who are taking to the courts to stop Enbridge’s Northern Gateway project.

Led by the Gitxaala, Heiltsuk, Kitasoo/Xai’xais, Nadleh Whut’en, Nak’azdli and Haida — nations united in their fierce opposition to tar sands oil endangering their traditional territories — Pull Together’s involvement synchronized with a very active movement against tar sands pipelines in B.C. and community-based opposition Enbridge in particular. The campaign is using a new model of online fundraising that, combined with real-world, grassroots organizing, is delivering solid results.

If you want to understand what makes Elizabeth Warren so special in American politics, consider her nervy leadership of the campaign to block President Obama’s foolish nomination of one Antonio Weiss to be the top Treasury official in charge of the domestic financial system, including enforcement of the Dodd-Frank Act.

For most of his Wall Street career, Weiss has epitomized everything that reeks about financial abuses. As chief of international mergers and acquisitions for Lazard, Weiss orchestrated what are delicately known as “corporate inversions,” in which a domestic corporation moves its nominal headquarters offshore, to avoid its U.S. taxes. It’s hard to improve on Sen. Warren’s description of this play, in her Huffington Post blog of last Wednesday: [..]

And that’s only the beginning. Many of the other deals orchestrated by Weiss resulted in operating companies being bought and sold by giant conglomerates, where the “savings” and “increased efficiency” came mainly from tax breaks and reduced worker compensation.

Weiss, who was paid $15.4 million by Lazard over the past 23 months, will receive another $21.2 million as an early retirement payment if he is confirmed for the Treasury job.

Robert Reich: Why College Is Necessary But Gets You Nowhere

This is the time of year when high school seniors apply to college, and when I get lots of mail about whether college is worth the cost.

The answer is unequivocally yes, but with one big qualification. I’ll come to the qualification in a moment but first the financial case for why it’s worth going to college.

Put simply, people with college degrees continue to earn far more than people without them. And that college “premium” keeps rising.

Last year, Americans with four-year college degrees earned on average 98 percent more per hour than people without college degrees. [..]

But here’s the qualification, and it’s a big one.

A college degree no longer guarantees a good job. The main reason it pays better than the job of someone without a degree is the latter’s wages are dropping.

In fact, it’s likely that new college graduates will spend some years in jobs for which they’re overqualified.

Michael W. Twitty: Americans love the Thanksgiving myth. But food folklore masks a painful reality

None of our culinary traditions were really just shared or contributed – and they certainly were not ‘gifted to us’

Americans love our origin myths – like the comforting one that, before the conflicts, wars and slavery started, there was an idyllic moment in which the “Pilgrims” and their indigenous welcoming committee sat down in a peaceful potluck of multicultural exchange, each contributing something old to the new.

But Thanksgiving is hardly the only celebration of the idea of culinary “contribution” – there’s a similar narrative about the plantation South, where African foods appear in the culinary narrative, as though they were proffered to white Americans through an altruistic cultural exchange program.

The superstar Southern chef, Sean Brock, even recently described the presence of the West African rice in lowcountry Carolina foods as “gifted to us”, without ever asking who “us” is. [..]

But let’s be clear: none of our culinary traditions were ever really just shared or contributed – and they certainly weren’t “gifted”. That latter term is especially galling, since my ancestors in the Carolina lowcountry were coerced through forced labor and with the threat of physical punishment to provide every iota of value from their expertise in rice culture and cuisine to their white owners; it was hardly a gift.