Tag: Punting the Pundits

We want to believe in justice for all, but when guns are in white privileged hands, blind justice remains impossible to expect

“I think it’s a vindication for justice.” Angela Corey said that. This is the same Angela Corey whose office failed, not so long ago, to secure a guilty verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman for the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. But there was the Florida state attorney on Wednesday afternoon, having secured a guilty verdict – delivered by a mostly white-male jury in about five hours – that condemned Michael Dunn to a minimum of 25 years to life in prison for the first-degree murder of 17-year-old Jordan Davis.

This is a season in which we are witnessing the senseless murder of black bodies by white hands, hands that occupy a privileged white space. This is a season in which the victimhood of white killers – their implied innocence – is accepted or taken as given. This verdict in Florida on Wednesday afternoon tips towards a promise that justice is truly blind. But justice in America is fickle.

Zoë Carpenter: Don’t Fall for the GOP’s Over-the-Counter Contraception Racket

It’s time to call bullshit on the GOP’s embrace of over-the-counter birth control. Several Republican candidates, under fire for radical positions on women’s health, have recently adopted the idea in a naked attempt to woo female voters. These politicians say they’re all in favor of access to contraception. But sudden calls for the pill to be available without a prescription do not signal a real shift in conservative attitudes toward reproductive rights. They simply mask tired opposition to the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that insurers cover birth control. [..]

It doesn’t matter what Republicans are or aren’t intent on. The bottom line is that a variety of conservative positions, from opposition to the ACA to federal funding for women’s clinics, have had or would have the very real effect of making it more difficult for women to access healthcare in general and contraceptives specifically.

Furthermore, contraception is hardly the sum of women’s medical needs. When conservatives fight to empower women to make decisions about their own bodies in all cases, regardless of income, then maybe we’ll take them seriously. In the meantime, there’s little of substance in an ideology that promotes birth control without a prescription for some women and hanging for others.

John Nichols: The Supreme Court That Made It Easier to Buy Elections Just Made It Harder for People to Vote in Them

In case there was any remaining confusion with regard to the precise political intentions of the US Supreme Court’s activist majority, things were clarified Monday. The same majority that has made it easier for corporations to buy elections (with the Citizens United v. FEC decision) and for billionaires to become the dominant players in elections across the country (with the McCutcheon v. FEC decision) decided to make it harder for people in Ohio to vote.

Yes, this Court has messed with voting rights before, frequently and in damaging ways. It has barely been a year since the majority struck down key elements of the Voting Rights Act.

But Monday’s decision by the majority was especially blatant-and immediate. One day before early voting was set to begin in Ohio on Tuesday, the Supreme Court delayed the start of the process with a decision that will reduce the early voting period from thirty-five days to twenty-eight days.

Jonathan Jones: Banksy wanted Clacton-on-Sea to confront racism – instead it confronted him

Tendring district council has destroyed a painting that eloquently challenged views on immigration – was it too close to home?

It must say something about the swirling currents of prejudice, fear and anger in modern Britain that even Banksy cannot predict their next bizarre lurch.

From Bristol to New York, this street artist has made his reputation by wittily mocking power and money. In Manhattan he satirised McDonald’s (not, perhaps his most original target) and in Cheltenham, near GCHQ, he painted spies snooping on a phone box. Usually people love him for it. The political content of Banksy’s art is generally so accepted and enjoyed that it has become tame. Far from being challenged, people gush at the prices it fetches.

It comes as a genuine shock, then, that a council has removed one of his paintings instead of calling in the valuers. Tendring district council says it destroyed the new painting that materialised in Clacton-on-Sea – where Tory defector Douglas Carswell is about to fight a byelection for his new party Ukip – after getting a complaint that it was “offensive and racist”. Was it?

This week, tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents turned out to protest China’s plan for bringing democracy to that city. Rather than letting voters pick the candidates that get to run for chief executive, Beijing wants the candidates selected by a 1,200 person “nominating committee.” Critics charge the committee will be “dominated by a pro-Beijing business and political elite.” “We want genuine universal suffrage,” Martin Lee, founding chairman of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party demanded, “not democracy with Chinese characteristics.”

But there’s not much particularly Chinese in the Hong Kong design, unless Boss Tweed was an ancient Chinese prophet. Tweed famously quipped, “I don’t care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating.” Beijing’s proposal is just Tweedism updated: a multi-stage election, with a biased filter at the first stage.

The pattern has been common in America’s democracy too. Across the Old South, the Democratic Primary was limited to “whites only.” That bias produced a democracy responsive to whites — only. The battle for equal rights was a fight to remove that illegitimate bias, and give African Americans an equal say in their government.

Gail Collins: Securing Social Security

There was this at the Senate debate in Iowa on Sunday:

“I will fight hard to protect Social Security and Medicare for seniors like my mom and dad because our Greatest Generation has worked so hard for the American dream for our families,” said Republican Joni Ernst.

Like many conservatives, Ernst supports some sort of privatization in the Social Security program. She’s a little hazy on the details. But we do know that the Greatest Generation is the name Tom Brokaw gave to the Americans who came through the Depression and spent their young adulthood fighting World War II. They would actually be Joni Ernst’s grandparents. [..]

Conservative Republicans still tend to hew to the theory that the system is “going bankrupt” and needs to be turned into some kind of private retirement investment account. They also generally promise to protect people 55 or over from any change.

Amy Goodman: A Force More Powerful in Jefferson County, Colo.

“Don’t make history a mystery” read one of the signs at a rally in Jefferson County, Colo. High-school students in this suburban district, referred to locally as “JeffCo,” have been walking out of class en masse this past week, protesting the planned censorship of the district’s Advanced Placement (AP) United States history curriculum by the local school board. The board proposed a committee that would review the course, and others, adding material to “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights,” as well as eliminating anything the board thought could “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.” The student walkout coincided with several days of “sick-outs” by teachers. Ironically, the school board’s attempts to stifle teaching about the history of protest in the United States has provoked a growing protest movement. [..]

The power of school boards is often underestimated. “I’ve been paying attention to the school board for the past year, and I have been increasingly concerned about what’s been going on,” Ashlyn Maher told me. She is a senior at Chatfield High School who helped organize the student walkouts. Civil disobedience has a long and storied role in U.S. history. The Declaration of Independence itself, so cherished by conservatives and progressives alike, instructs “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed … That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” Maher says that disobedience is “the foundation of our country. I took AP U.S. history myself, and all I was presented with were the facts. And then I made the opinions based on those facts. I was never told what to think.”

Thor Benson: Shrinking the Global Income Gap

John Steinbeck allegedly once said: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

That’s part of what activists like the Occupy movement see as the problem in this country today. Americans have been jailed and abused, as we saw in the case of Cecily McMillan, in their efforts to bring the issue of income inequality into the spotlight. Ever since the Occupy movement amplified the battle cry of the 99 percent, the country has been appraised of the fact that a small group of people, to whom we refer as the 1 percent, controls almost 40 percent of the wealth in the U.S. The Fight for $15 movement is still going strong among employees of fast-food restaurants and other low-paid workers, and the debate doesn’t seem likely to go away anytime soon.

In a Washington paralyzed by partisan division, there is apparently one area of bipartisan agreement: Congress should ignore its constitutional mandate to vote on war with the Islamic State, a conflict that President Obama admits will take years.

The president says he’d “welcome” congressional support but doesn’t need it. Democratic leaders Rep. Nancy Pelosi (CA) and Sen. Harry Reid (NV) agree. Republican House Speaker John Boehner (OH) argues Congress should postpone any debate until next year. He allows it might be in the “nation’s interest” for members of Congress to weigh in, but it certainly isn’t an imperative. The leaders of Congress treat their own body as vestigial, offering little beyond symbolic gesture on the vital question of war and peace.

This bipartisan consensus about expanding the executive’s war-making powers directly contradicts the Constitution of the United States. The founders gave Congress, not the president, the power to declare war. Their purpose was clear. War was the instrument by which kings and dictators consolidated power and impoverished nations. They feared that the executive by its nature was more given to war. James Wilson, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, summarized the consensus: Giving the power to Congress “will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress.”

Michelle Chen: Is ‘Big Data’ Actually Reinforcing Social Inequalities?

Sometimes it feels like we live in an era when information is finally becoming “free”-unlimited media access, the “quantified self” of twenty-four-hour wellness tracking, endless dating possibilities. But there’s nothing inherently progressive about Big Data, and all that data collection can actually bolster inequality and undermine personal privacy. A new report reveals that when Big Data creeps into our work and financial lives, civil rights may get severely squeezed.

The report, “Civil Rights, Big Data, and Our Algorithmic Future” by the think tank Robinson + Yu, confronts the challenges of an information landscape where knowledge can be oppressively overwhelming. While it’s true that Big Data-the amassing of huge amounts of statistical information on social and economic trends and human behavior-can be empowering for some, it’s often wielded as a tool of control. While we’re busy tracking our daily carb intake, every data packet we submit, each image we toss into the cloud, is hoarded and parsed by powerful institutions that manage our everyday lives.

Data collection has accelerated due to technological advancements, the declining cost of data mining and storage, and the intensified surveillance climate of post-9/11 America. But while the Algorithmic Future seems inevitable and exciting, say the authors, it creates gray areas in labor rights, privacy and ethics.

Cori Crider: Gitmo hunger strikes are a cry for help. Why is the US fighting back with secret torture?

Force-feeding at Guantánamo shames America – not just in the bad old days of George W Bush, but today, in 2014. And you deserve to hear the truth, loud and clear

“Safe, Humane, Legal, Transparent”: so goes the slogan of the world’s most famous offshore prison. It’s an Obama-era rebrand, a bid by Gitmo’s PR people to persuade Americans that today’s is a kinder, gentler Guantánamo Bay. There’s just one wrinkle: Gitmo is stilldangerous, nasty, lawless and secretive – and the evidence just keeps piling up.

At the forefront of this war over the truth is the first-ever trial concerning the practice of force-feeding prisoners on hunger strike, due to start Monday. My client, Abu Wa’el Dhiab – a Syrian man who has never been charged, and indeed has been cleared to leave Guantánamo by the US government for more than five years – has been fighting for over a year to reform the way he and other hunger-strikers have been treated. He’s finally about to have his day in court.

But the Obama administration refuses to accept this unusual intrusion of justice into its island idyll. On Friday, US justice department attorneys filed a motion asking the court to hear all evidence in the trial entirely in closed court, save a short, anodyne opening statement from lawyers on both sides.

Donna Smiith: US Health Care System Cartel… Until Death Us Do Part

One common definition of a cartel is: an association of manufacturers or suppliers with the purpose of maintaining prices at a high level and restricting competition.  Or if you prefer this definition from Merriam-Webster, here you go: car-tel, noun: a group of businesses that agree to fix prices so they all will make more money.  I think that pretty much sums up what the U.S. health care system has become.

If you doubt that collusion exists in the provision of health care in the profit-driven U.S. health care system, please think again.  Why and how would all the health insurance prices, drug prices, and sometimes the provider charges and practices all end up being within a small window of pricing and policy?  (Oh, and the definition of collusion?  Here you go: collusion is  a secret cooperation for an illegal or dishonest purpose.)  You may try to cite some economic factoring and actuarial analysis as the reasoning behind the pricing, but then how do the profits all balloon to such grotesque levels, too, if not through price fixing and the collusion of the industry to hang as tightly together on the cartel agreements as they possibly can?

As a patient, as a policy holder, and as a caregiver to another patient, I have grown so weary of needing to play my part in the profit-taking every time I am in need of medical help. If holistic or alternative medicine were such a great alternative for the treatment of all illness, I would have gone that route by now, but the costs and the lack of any insurance coverage for most of these alternatives makes that an impossibility even if I believe some of those treatments are really good.  So, when I am sick and cannot get better on my own or when my husband is ill and cannot get better on his own, we are at the mercy of the health care cartel.

I often wonder why all this collusion is allowable when the U.S. Justice Department says it isn’t legal in the U.S.  Check it out, from the U.S. government: When competitors collude, prices are inflated and the customer is cheated. Price fixing, bid rigging, and other forms of collusion are illegal and are subject to criminal prosecution by the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice.

Eric Holder was U.S. attorney general at a time when the world desperately needed the nation’s chief law enforcement officer to hold accountable the elite bankers who oversaw the epidemic of fraud that drove the 2008 global financial crisis and triggered the Great Recession. After nearly six years in office, Holder announced on Sept. 25 that he plans to step down, without having brought to justice even one of the executives responsible for the crisis. His tenure represents the worst strategic failure against elite white-collar crime in the history of the Department of Justice (DOJ).  [..]

In addition to the failure to prosecute the leaders of those massive frauds, Holder’s dismal record includes 1) failing to prosecute the elite bankers who led the largest (by several orders of magnitude) price-rigging cartel in history – the LIBOR scandal, in which the world’s largest banks conspired to rig the reported interest rates at which the banks were willing to lend to one another, which affected prices on over $300 trillion in transactions; 2) failing to prosecute the massive foreclosure frauds (robo-signing), in which bank employees perjured themselves by signing more than 100,000 false affidavits in order to deceive the authorities that they had a right to foreclose on homes; 3) failing to prosecute the bid-rigging cartels of bond issuances in order to raise the costs to U.S. cities, counties and states of borrowing money in order to increase banks’ illegal profits; 4) failing to prosecute money laundering by HSBC for the murderous Sinaloa and Norte del Valle drug cartels; 5)  failing to prosecute the senior bank officers of Standard Chartered who helped fund of terrorists and nations that support terrorism; and 6) failing to prosecute the controlling officers of Credit Suisse who for decades helped wealthy Americans unlawfully evade U.S. taxes and then obstructed investigations by the DOJ and Internal Revenue Service for many years.  

Eugene Robinson: Get the Authorization

President Obama should call Congress back to Washington for a special session to vote on authorizing war against the Islamic State. If he does not, Congress should return on its own to conduct this vital debate.

Do your jobs, everybody.

As legal justification for the war, Obama relies on two measures, passed more than a decade ago, that authorized U.S. military action against al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. To state the blindingly obvious, things have changed.

The Islamic State is not al-Qaeda. While the 2001 authorization for war against Osama bin Laden’s terrorist group encompasses “associated forces,” al-Qaeda refuses to have anything to do with the Islamic State. And the 2002 authorization for war in Iraq-targeting a government that no longer exists-says not a solitary word about airstrikes in Syria.

Peter Rugh: After the People’s Climate March, It Is Time to Demand More

The 400,000 people who packed Manhattan’s Central Park West for the People’s Climate March on September 21 have all gone home to their apartments, farms, cabins and lobster boats. They’ve returned to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and the Wet’suwet’en territory in British Columbia, to the Philippines and the Pacific Islands. The “U.N. Climate Summit” banner that, last week, formed the backdrop for the impassioned speeches of 120 heads of state – and Leonardo DiCaprio – has been taken down. Debate in the newly renovated General Assembly Hall has turned to terrorism – a different kind of security threat than that posed by drought and rising sea levels. The metal barricades erected against protesters who flooded the heart of global capitalism at last Monday’s Flood Wall Street demonstration have been cautiously removed by the New York Police Department. Frostpaw the polar bear has gone to jail.

The summit convened by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, which served as the inspiration for the People’s Climate March and Flood Wall Street, occurred ahead of conferences scheduled for Lima in December and Paris in 2015, where new long-term agreements for reducing greenhouse gas emissions will be hammered out. If we are to believe 98 percent of the world’s scientists, the future of human subsistence on this planet hinges on the strength of the pacts world governments will forge. Precious time will tell what the lasting impacts of the demonstrations will be, but already the protests that shook New York and much of the world (there were over 2,000 People’s Climate Marches globally) appear to have left their mark upon upper echelon spheres of powe

Wendall Potter: Improving the ‘Patient Experience’ By Eliminating the Big Insurance Company

Health care provider organizations that are working directly with employers like Boeing — and cutting out the insurance company middlemen — believe they can do more than save money for those employers. They’re confident they can also improve both health care quality and service for workers and their families in ways that insurance companies cannot.

Employers are starting to realize that insurers might not be, as they have claimed, “part of the solution” to achieving a more patient-centered health care system. In fact, in some ways they have been part of the problem.

Providence-Swedish Health Alliance, a not-for-profit, hospital-based accountable care organization (ACO), will soon be providing both coverage and care to many Boeing employees, along with UW (University of Washington) Medicine — without an insurance firm. Officials at Providence-Swedish told me Boeing chose to work with them directly in part because of the firm’s desire to ensure their employees had a “better patient experience.” While cutting costs and improving quality of care were priorities, improving service and reducing hassles that have become synonymous with insurance company interactions was equally important to Boeing.

>/div>

Because the air strikes in Iraq didn’t work, but the US is bombing Syria now. Because the model is a failure. Because he hasn’t had to answer for anything yet

In case you missed it, the US military expanded its war on Isis into a second country this week. And, no, you didn’t miss President Obama giving an interview or taking any questions about the air strikes – because he didn’t, and he hasn’t. Since all acts of war deserve questioning, here is what every reporter and citizen might ask the American president about a military campaign that has been conducted, thus far, by way of misleading euphemisms and possibly illegal rationale.

Robert Kuttner: Bridging the Chasm

For half a century beginning with Franklin Roosevelt, there was a direct connection between the problems that afflicted American society and the remedies on offer from our democratic system.

High unemployment? The New Deal, the World War II mobilization, and the postwar boom took care of that.

Stagnant wages? With unions, growing productivity, minimum wage laws, and other regulation of labor standards — American real wages tripled.

Education? The G.I. bill, massive investment in public universities, community colleges, and later in public elementary and secondary education produced a better educated and more productive population. And until the 1980s, public higher education was basically free.

Robert Reich: Raising Most People’s Wages

I was in Seattle, Washington, recently, to congratulate union and community organizers who helped Seattle enact the first $15 per hour minimum wage in the country.

Other cities and states should follow Seattle’s example.

Contrary to the dire predictions of opponents, the hike won’t cost Seattle jobs. In fact, it will put more money into the hands of low-wage workers who are likely to spend almost all of it in the vicinity. That will create jobs.

Conservatives believe the economy functions better if the rich have more money and everyone else has less. But they’re wrong. It’s just the opposite.

Jason Edward Harrington: Take it from an airport security agent: it’s OK to laugh at toothpaste terror threats

You know what’s not funny? Government officials who use shoe, underwear and even cupcake bomb scares as an excuse to drop bombs of their own

The other day in Syria, the US conducted air strikes on a relatively unknown and possibly non-existent entity called the Khorasan group, which sounds more like a job-killing consulting firm than a people-killing al-Qaida spinoff. It was a surprise plot point in the campaign against Isis that left the kind of Strangelovian headlines that have become par for the course in the War on Terror. Take this one, from the Independent: “Syria air strikes: Khorasan Group ‘were working to make toothpaste bombs and explosives that could pass through airport security'”. Or this one: “Khorasan Group plotted attack against US with explosive clothes”.

This isn’t the first time the plane-flying public has gotten word of cavity-fighting and/or sartorial threats to international airliners: the concept of the toothpaste bomb first surfaced during the Sochi Olympics earlier this year, and the clothes-dipped-in-liquid-explosives menace came to attention back in August 2013. And of course, just a few months ago, there was speculation about the need for airline passengers to fear an iBomb. The only thing that changed between then and now is that anonymous officials slapped a name on the alleged masterminds behind these absurd plots, and then dropped bombs on them.

The strategic ‘rebel’ breakthrough is being prepared in the vulnerable southern underbelly of the country

The U.S. offensive against ISIS in Syria will very soon revert to its original mission: regime change in Damascus, the strategic objective that unites America’s Euro-Arab-Turkish-Israeli coalition. Although U.S. military planners insist it will take eight months to a year to fully assemble and train a “moderate” Syrian rebel spearhead to confront government forces, political and military realities dictate that the Americans must move much more quickly to upset the balance of forces on the ground. Otherwise, the whole structure of western dominance in the region could unravel – catastrophically.

The contradiction at the heart of the western crisis in Syria, is the refusal of tens of thousands of jihadists to act as mere foot soldiers for the West and Arab monarchs. The jihadist genie is out of the bottle, and its conjurers and paymasters cannot put it back. The problem is not just Isis. The Islamic State has swelled through absorption of other Islamic fighters pursuing a similar theo-political logic, one that seeks its own version of “liberation” from western shackles and, increasingly, the overthrow of royal regimes allied with the United States. ISIS has become engorged with defectors from other Islamist organizations more dependent on and obedient to proxy war planners in Riyadh, Doha, Ankara and Washington. Therefore, ISIS must be punished, to reduce its appeal to the jihadist rank and file, who make up the bulk of effective fighters arrayed against the Syrian state. For the same reasons, those jihadists not yet in ISIS’s orbit, who are the West’s only actually existing resources on ground, must be provided a redemptive victory, and quickly, before the whole edifice of proxy war disintegrates.

Shamus Cooke: The Unspoken Consequences of Bombing Syria

Now that U.S. bombs are falling in Syria, will Islamic extremism be stopped in its tracks? Such a question is an insult to the intellect, yet it’s the dominant theory in Washington D.C., where years of Middle East war have taught politicians nothing.  

Bombing yet another Middle East country will create yet more extremists, while broadening an already-existing proxy war in Syria between regional rivals. Obama’s strategy to combat ISIS purposely excludes key players that, if included, could actually help stop the fighting. The strategy of exclusion will thus intensify the regional proxy fight, leading to the likelihood of even deeper U.S. involvement in the Syrian war and a broader conflagration.

Iran, Syria, and Russia were not invited to join the war against ISIS, since the broader regional proxy war is a war between the U.S. and its allies versus Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and Russia.

Syria cannot join the anti-ISIS coalition even though Syria has been fighting ISIS for over two years. Obama’s reason is that the Syrian government has “no legitimacy.” But Obama’s “coalition” of Gulf states are composed of totalitarian dictatorships that, in comparison, make Syria look like the bastion of democracy.

David Sirota: A Pension Jackpot for Wall Street

Most consumers understand that when you pay an above-market premium, you shouldn’t expect to get a below-average product. Why, then, is this principle often ignored when it comes to managing billions of dollars in public pension systems?

This is one of the most significant questions facing states and cities as they struggle to meet their contractual obligations to public employees. In recent years, public officials have shifted more of those workers’ pension money into private equity, hedge funds, venture capital and other so-called “alternative investments.” In all, the National Association of State Retirement Administrators reports that roughly a quarter of all pension funds are now in these “alternative investments”-a tripling in just 12 years.

Those investments are managed by private financial firms, which charge special fees that pension systems do not pay when they invest in stock index funds and bonds. The idea is that paying those fees-which can cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year-will be worth it, because the alternative investments will supposedly deliver higher returns than low-fee stock index funds like the S&P 500.

Unfortunately, while these alternative investments have delivered a fee jackpot to Wall Street firms, they have often delivered poor returns, meaning the public is paying a premium for a subpar product.

The first black president turned over his public confrontation of structural racism entirely to his outgoing attorney general. What now?

Where is the first black president’s justifiable anger about racism now that he never has to run for office again? Where is he when another black child, John Crawford, is murdered on camera by police, in five seconds, in the pet-food aisle of a Walmart? What is Obama doing about the prejudice and violence faced by brown people here at home?

As I sat in a New York auditorium Tuesday afternoon, disappointed that my black president had checked out on racism (if he had ever checked in), it became increasingly obvious that Obama has now turned over his public confrontation of racism entirely to another black man: Eric Holder.

The US attorney general may not exactly be the “Obama Anger Translator” dreamed up by Key and Peele, but Holder is Obama’s black id. Whatever fight this administration might have left on systemic racism would be channelled through him. And now that Holder is stepping down, whatever hope might’ve been left in this failed chapter is fading fast.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Everything That’s Wrong With The NFL Is Wrong With America, Too

The NFL has 1,856 employees and paid $107.7 million per year in salaries last year. Goodell was paid more than $44 million. That means more than 40 percent of the organization’s entire payroll went to one individual. See the problem?

Sexism. A culture of violence. Untrustworthy leadership. Runaway wealth inequality. An indifference to workers’ health. Employees who are above the law. Hush-hush financing. Multimillion-dollar tax breaks.

We’re not talking about corporate CEOs or the Christmas parties on Wall Street. We’re talking about the National Football League.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s handling of Ray Rice’s videotaped brutality has brought the NFL back into the public eye. It’s a sorry spectacle which others have addressed at length, so we’ll just repeat the cliché: It’s the cover-up, stupid.

For my personal assessment of Goodell, we can turn the mic over to Bill Simmons and UltraViolet.

As for the NFL itself, let’s just say it’s America in microcosm.

Robert Borosage: Bill Clinton’s Corporate Fantasy

Bill Clinton predicts corporations will care less about profits and more about workers and communities, without government action. Terrific, but the big companies aren’t with the program. Their CEOs are cashing in and leaving communities and countries behind.

At annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, former President Bill Clinton predicted the corporations would soon care less about maximizing profits and more about employees and society. This would happen without significant government involvement because “of proof that markets work better that way.” Companies would understand that they gain greater overall success by taking care of their employees and doing good for more than only their shareholders.

We should only hope. This revolution in the corporate worldview would be immensely important, to say the least. The focus on “shareholder value” — magnified by lavish executive compensation packages – has driven executives to focus on meeting short-term profit goals, scramble for every tax dodge, trample worker rights, and play communities and countries off against one another in a brutal race to the bottom.

There are socially responsible companies. Many gather at the Social Venture Network. Socially responsible investment funds give investors the ability to screen their investments. The recent movement to divest from fossil fuel companies is an example.

Sadly, there is little to suggest that major corporations have gotten the former president’s message. Current trends suggest the reverse: that CEOs are plundering their companies assets, cashing in their future to reap short-term profits and bonuses.

The Obama administration has devised an extraordinary legal justification for carrying out bombing attacks inside Syria: that the United States and its Persian Gulf allies have the right to defend Iraq against the Islamic State because the Syrian government is unable to stop the cross-border terror group. [..]

Yet, beyond the danger to world order if such an expansive theory is embraced by the international community (does anyone remember how World War One got started?), there is the hypocrisy of the U.S. government and many of those same Gulf allies arming, training and funding Syrian rebels for the purpose of preventing the Syrian military from controlling its territory and then citing that lack of control as the rationale to ignore Syria’s sovereignty.

In other words, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and other enemies of Syria covertly backed the rebels inside Syria and watched as many of them – including thousands of the U.S.-preferred “moderates” – took their newly acquired military skills to al-Qaeda affiliates and other terrorist organizations. Then, the U.S. and its allies have the audacity to point to the existence of those terror groups inside Syria as a rationale for flying bombing raids into Syria.

Amy Goodman: Global Warming and Global Warring

Hours after 400,000 people joined in the largest climate march in history, the United States began bombing Syria, starting yet another war. The Pentagon claims that the targets were military installations of the Islamic State, in Syria and Iraq, as well a newly revealed terrorist outfit, the Khorasan Group. President Barack Obama is again leading the way to war, while simultaneously failing to address our rapidly worsening climate. The world is beset with twin crises, inextricably linked: global warming and global warring. Solutions to both exist, but won’t be achieved by bombing. [..]

Indeed, the Pentagon has long considered climate change to be a major threat to the national security of the United States. In its 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon noted that the many impacts of climate change “will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions-conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence.”

So it is fair to ask, why not address the threat of climate change when it is still possible? Asad Rehman, of the international environmental group Friends of the Earth, who was in New York for the climate march, told me, “If we can find the trillions [of dollars] we’re finding for conflict whether there’s been the invasion in Iraq or Afghanistan or now the conflict in Syria, then we can find the kind of money that’s required for the transformation that will deliver clean, renewable energy.”

Richard (RJ) Eskow: 100 Zephyrs: Why the Left Must Challenge Corporate Democrats

Writing in Real Clear Politics, my Campaign for America’s Future colleague Bill Scher dismisses Zephyr Teachout’s call for progressive primary challenges against conservative Democrats. Scher argues the left should focus instead on “gaining influence without launching a civil war,” arguing that “unlike the dynamic in the Republican Party, disagreements within the Democratic family are not debilitating.”

This idea has been raised before: that infighting between the party’s left and right wings are nothing more than a set of relatively minor policy differences within the “Democratic family” (to use Scher’s words), and that they’re best solved with genteel discussion and issue-oriented campaigns rather than “war”-like primary challenges.

It’s an attractive vision. Unfortunately, it’s also wrong. [..]

Elected Democrats must understand that a betrayal of their principles will have consequences for their electoral futures. There may be cases where a primary is ill-advised. But we need hundreds of Zephyr Teachouts, ready to challenge straying Dems when they break their campaign promises, shift their allegiances to the corporate “dark side,” or forget to “dance with the ones who brought ’em.”

You can call that “civil war” if you like. I prefer the term “democracy.”

n the age of trickle-down economics and unrelenting attacks on the social safety net, there have been few greater champions of progressive values than Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who hosted his final Steak Fry this year as the senior senator from Iowa. Throughout his storied career, Harkin has remained a “prairie populist.” From his landmark Americans With Disabilities Act, to his principled vote against Clinton-era financial deregulation, to his recent sponsorship of the Fair Minimum Wage Act, Harkin has always been unapologetically loyal to the fundamental belief that government can – and should – play a role in improving people’s lives. And for Harkin, who proudly displayed his father’s Works Progress Administration card on his office wall, this brand of progressivism was deeply rooted in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal philosophy. [..]

Our current political battles, as they have been for the past 70 years, are largely defined by the right’s bitter desire to roll back the gains of the New Deal and the Great Society. And as Harkin prepares to retire next year, many have been writing obituaries for his brand of progressive politics. “Today he is seen as one of a dying breed of Democrats,” The Post’s Dan Balz observed. “[H]e remains an unabashedly and old-fashioned liberal.”

But the would-be eulogists predicting that these ideals will follow Harkin into retirement are wrong. While Harkin’s departure will be a loss, the mantle of New Deal liberalism that he proudly carried has been passed on. In recent years, what the late Sen. Paul Wellstone called “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” hasn’t lost its way; on the contrary, it has found it.

Jessica Valenti: Roger Goodell wants YOU to accept his nightmare of violence and sexism

Throwing money at women’s rights groups is not how you fix a fundamentally misogynist institution

In the wake of the Ray Rice horror show, and the Adrian Peterson horror show, and the Greg Hardy horror show, and the Ray McDonald horror show, and the Daryl Washington horror show, and the Jonathan Dwyer horror show, and the 725 other arrests among the players who make money for him, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell announced on Friday afternoon in a mea culpa press conference that all 32 teams and their employees must attend educational sessions on domestic violence and sexual assault. Sounds promising, until you get to the part where it’s the NFL itself that’s designing the program. Will there be sessions on “hiding videos for beginners?” A lunch program on crafting the perfect tweet to blame a player’s battered spouse? How to blame your parents for beating your four-year-old son?

I understand that these programs are likely the first of many stops on the NFL apology tour, but I find it difficult to believe the answer to all of this drawn-out wrongdoing will be found in NFL locker rooms, with employees listening to mandatory NFL-designed domestic violence speakers. According to Goodell’s announcement, these compulsory programs are being developed by the NFL Players Association and a “top group of experts” that the NFL hired last week. And the woman in charge of one anti-violence organizations the NFL plans to “partner” with told me Sunday night that, as of right now, the relationship is purely financial.

This is what Roger Goodell and the NFL are asking of us: to accept their nightmare of violence, sexism and cover-ups with the hope that a dash of contrition and remedial classes on why hitting women is wrong will make everything OK.

Joan Walsh: The Dick Cheney view of presidential power is winning

Feckless Congress campaigns instead of voting on Syrian airstrikes, while McCain and Graham want to move on Assad

President Obama warned earlier this month that he intended to use airstrikes in Iraq and Syria to “degrade and destroy” ISIS. Immediately the New York Times as well as legal scholars shrieked that the president needed to seek authorization of any Syria strikes from Congress. “Nothing attempted by his predecessor, George W. Bush, remotely compares in imperial hubris,” wrote Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman.

But Congress shrugged. After voting to fund the training of Syrian rebels, both the Senate and the House departed to campaign in the 2014 midterms.

Now that the bombs are dropping, few in Congress are even bothering to argue that they ought to deal with the question when they get back after the election. Sen. Tim Kaine is an exception: he is accusing his colleagues of accepting Dick Cheney’s view of the president’s power to wage pre-emptive war.

Heather Digby Parton: The right’s new religious war: Why they see ISIS as Christianity’s big threat

From Ann Coulter to Ted Cruz, a new strain of far-right thinking is developing a scary foreign policy

   “This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while…”

   – George W. Bush, September 16, 2001

Most people probably recall that comment pretty vividly as it provoked an outcry among America’s allies in both Europe and the Middle East for obvious reasons. The word “crusade” in that particular context is an explicit historical reference that places the “war on terrorism” in the category of a religious conflict. Bush, to his credit, never used the word again and went out of his way throughout his term to downplay any talk that he was waging a religious war.

Not that it stopped the usual suspects from saying so, of course. Ann Coulter issued a notorious cri de guerre on behalf of the entire conservative movement in October of 2001 saying, “we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity!” Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, whose radio show is frequented by Republican officials and conservative luminaries has been preaching this gospel for some time as well.