Tag: Punting the Pundits

Corruption and austerity collide to make the governor unworthy of the office

New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo is usually defined in cold partisan terms. Fox News host Sean Hannity recently cited the governor’s support of gay marriage as the kind of cultural liberal intolerance that would drive religious conservatives like him out of the state. Cuomo also faces complaints from the left, on the grounds that he has implemented a strictly right-wing economic agenda that involves tax breaks for the wealthy and fighting state unions.

The contrasting views would seem to paint him as a deft political player who knows how to find electoral safety in the center. But the late New York City Mayor Ed Koch, speaking on the night of Cuomo’s election as governor in 2010, described him differently: “He is a schmuck.” Koch was convinced that during his 1977 mayoral campaign against Mario Cuomo, it was his opponent’s son Andrew Cuomo who was responsible for the hateful slogan “Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo.”

Cuomo’s current problems are not of a partisan nature but of the kind of vain disregard for playing by the rules that caused Koch to hold such a grudge.

Robert Parry: Behind Obama’s ‘Chaotic’ Foreign Policy

President Barack Obama’s foreign policy has been disjointed and even incoherent because he has – since taking office in 2009 – pursued conflicting strategies, mixing his own penchant for less belligerent “realism” with Official Washington’s dominant tough-guy ideologies of neoconservatism and its close cousin, “liberal interventionism.”

What this has meant is that Obama often has acted at cross-purposes, inclined to cooperate with sometimes adversaries like Russia on pragmatic solutions to thorny foreign crises, such as Syria’s chemical weapons and Iran’s nuclear program, but other times stoking these and other crises by following neocon demands that he adopt aggressive tactics against Russia, Syria, Iran and other “enemies.”[..]

Eugene Robinson: Spousal Secrets No More

How far would you go to stay out of jail? Would you publicly humiliate your wife of 38 years, portraying her as some kind of shrieking harridan? Would you put the innermost secrets of your marriage on display, inviting voyeurs to rummage at will?

For Robert McDonnell, the former Virginia governor on trial for alleged corruption, the answers appear to be: “As far as necessary,” “Hey, why not?” and “Sounds like a plan.”

McDonnell’s testimony this week in a Richmond federal courtroom about his wife Maureen’s psychological turmoil has been both cringe-worthy and compelling. It has been clear for some time that McDonnell’s strategy for winning acquittal amounted to what could be called the “crazy wife” defense. But only when he took the stand did it become apparent how thoroughly he intended to humiliate the “soul mate” he still claims to love.

McDonnell disclosed Thursday that he moved out of the family’s home shortly before the trial began. “I knew there was no way I could go home after a day in court and have to rehash the day’s events with my wife,” he testified.

I guess not. Anyone who said such things in public about his or her spouse would be advised to clear out.

The tragedy and ensuing crisis in Ferguson, Missouri, have shown the ability of social media to get the story told. David Carr wrote in The New York Times that, “Twitter has become an early warning service for news organizations, a way to see into stories even when they don’t have significant reporting assets on the ground. And in a situation hostile to traditional reporting, the crowdsourced, phone-enabled network of information that Twitter provides has proved invaluable.”

Also contemplating the situation in Ferguson, Zeynep Tufekci, a fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy noted, “It seems like a world ago in which such places, and such incidents, would be buried in silence, though, of course, residents knew of their own ignored plight. Now, we expect documentation, live-feeds, streaming video, real time Tweets.”

Which is a reason why the new generation of civil rights leaders – despite opposition from legacy groups like the NAACP that have received significant funding from the media and telecommunications conglomerates – recognizes that maintaining an Internet accessible to all is crucial. “…Keep in mind, Ferguson is also a net neutrality issue,” Tufekci writes. “… How the Internet is run, governed and filtered is a human rights issue.”

Bradford Betz: The Same Hashish They Give Out

As the public release of the Senate’s report on a four-year investigation into the CIA’s torture program approaches, John Brennan, the agency’s director, is in an uncomfortable spotlight. The Senate Intelligence Committee, which is responsible for overseeing the CIA, has accused the agency of abusing its power. [..]

The ease with which Brennan lies about spying domestically and killing civilians abroad is quite disturbing. If John Brennan remains in power, furtherdisaster lies in wait.

While the CIA continues to operate beyond the bounds of legality, the smoke they create will blemish our integrity around the world. If the United States’ reputation can be rehabilitated, we must neither lie about nor trivialize what we are doing or what we have done.

“If I did something wrong,” Brennan said in an interview with Andrea Mitchell of NBC News, “I will go to the president, and I will explain to him exactly what I did and what the findings were. And he is the one who can ask me to stay or to go.”

Perhaps it is time for the president to take Brennan up on his offer.

Patrick Cokburn: Why Washington’s War on Terror Failed

There are extraordinary elements in the present U.S. policy in Iraq and Syria that are attracting surprisingly little attention. In Iraq, the U.S. is carrying out air strikes and sending in advisers and trainers to help beat back the advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (better known as ISIS) on the Kurdish capital, Erbil. The U.S. would presumably do the same if ISIS surrounds or attacks Baghdad. But in Syria, Washington’s policy is the exact opposite: there the main opponent of ISIS is the Syrian government and the Syrian Kurds in their northern enclaves. Both are under attack from ISIS, which has taken about a third of the country, including most of its oil and gas production facilities. [..]

The reality of U.S. policy is to support the government of Iraq, but not Syria, against ISIS. But one reason that group has been able to grow so strong in Iraq is that it can draw on its resources and fighters in Syria. Not everything that went wrong in Iraq was the fault of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, as has now become the political and media consensus in the West. Iraqi politicians have been telling me for the last two years that foreign backing for the Sunni revolt in Syria would inevitably destabilize their country as well.  This has now happened.

By continuing these contradictory policies in two countries, the U.S. has ensured that ISIS can reinforce its fighters in Iraq from Syria and vice versa. So far, Washington has been successful in escaping blame for the rise of ISIS by putting all the blame on the Iraqi government. In fact, it has created a situation in which ISIS can survive and may well flourish.

Joe Sexton: Paying Jabbar Collins $10 Million Doesn’t Address Problems With Prosecutors

The dollar figure was so large and the public statements of vindication and concession so harmonious, one might have been tempted to think the system had actually worked.

A wrongly convicted Brooklyn man had won his freedom when a federal judge called out a local prosecutor for misconduct. And then, this week, with the help of an able lawyer, the freed man won a $10 million settlement from New York City, gaining possible financial security for life.

But ProPublica’s reporting over the last two years suggests that any such temptation to think the system worked in the case of Jabbar Collins should be resisted.

The system for identifying and punishing misconduct by prosecutors is badly broken, our reporting shows, and with the Collins case settling, a crucial channel for exposing systemic problems and ensuring they don’t recur may close as well.

So many shortcomings spotlighted by the Collins case remain unresolved.

Representative Paul Ryan’s response to the shooting death of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri, police was fairly straightforward: say nothing, do nothing. “We should take a deep breath, let’s have some sympathy for the family and the community, and let’s not prejudge anything, and let’s let the investigation take its course and hope that justice is served appropriately,” he told Fox News on Tuesday. “But what I don’t want to do as a political leader is try to graft my policy initiatives or my preferences onto this tragedy.”

It was not a great moment in the Republican Party’s alleged outreach to minority communities, which Ryan has been championing, but this silence is a bipartisan affair. Many politicians on both sides of the aisle, with a few valuable exceptions, have by and large avoided what’s happening in Missouri entirely.

Most of the candidates likely to contend for the presidency in 2016 have been silent. Hillary Clinton, who has been eager in recent weeks to opine extensively on national issues as she embarked on a book tour, has acted as if the situation isn’t happening.

Anna Feigenbaum: The National Guard protects Ferguson’s police, not its people

Backing a militarized police force with civilian soldiers makes a mockery of the right to protest

On August 16, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon called National Guard troops into Ferguson to “ensure the safety and welfare of the citizens.” This call came amid international debate over the militarized police response to protests that were sparked by the police killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown. Commentators have questioned why, on top of heavily armed riot teams, the governor needs the National Guard?

Rarely deployed to deal with civilian unrest, in most instances National Guard troops lay sandbags and hand out bottles of water. But as troops turned up in Ferguson on Monday clad in military fatigues and equipped with rifles, they aroused memories of America’s past.

In Ferguson these civilian soldiers were clearly not there to just hand out water. As Monday night’s imagesof excessive force showed, the National Guard was called in to protect the police, not the people. Through wafts of tear gas, with guns ready, these troops provided military backup to an already militarized police force. For many, this is like rubbing salt in a community’s wounds. And as a closer look at the history of National Guard deployments makes clear – from Kent State to the Los Angeles riots – its presence often serves to justify police violence.

Robert Reich: The Disease of American Democracy

Americans are sick of politics. Only 13 percent approve of the job Congress is doing, a near record low. The president’s approval ratings are also in the basement.

A large portion of the public doesn’t even bother voting. Only 57.5 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots in the 2012 presidential election.

Put simply, most Americans feel powerless, and assume the political game is fixed. So why bother?

A new study scheduled to be published in this fall by Princeton’s Martin Gilens and Northwestern University’s Benjamin Page confirms our worst suspicions.

Gilens and Page analyzed 1,799 policy issues in detail, determining the relative influence on them of economic elites, business groups, mass-based interest groups, and average citizens.

Their conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

Clay Calvert: Honor Journalist James Foley: Don’t Watch the Video

If the early reports are correct and journalist James Foley was, in fact, executed by ISIS, you can honor him — and not play into the terroristic hands of that organization — simply by not watching the video of his murder.

Video voyeurism of the worst variety exists when we feast on the death of journalists who strive, through their reporting, to keep our society free. Resist the temptation to take even the briefest of looks.

A dozen years have passed since Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was killed by terrorists in Pakistan. The images from that tragedy are still haunting today. [..]

It’s been a tough enough stretch of days for journalists being arrested in Ferguson, Mo., but Foley’s apparent execution even puts those arrests into perspective when it comes to the dangers of being a journalist.

And if the reports of his death are wrong, then that would be the very best news to report.

In the ten days since Brown was killed, law enforcement have tried to quell protests with rubber bullets and tear gas, with at least four different police forces, with a charismatic captain, with a curfew, by forcing protesters to walk, not stand, and finally with the National Guard. On Tuesday, Johnson said police would again try a “different operational plan,” which seemed to amount to “hoping that protesters will stay home” at night.

There’s been a lot of talk about trust, and its absence, in Ferguson and elsewhere. “In too many communities around the country, a gulf of mistrust exists between local residents and law enforcement,” President Obama said Monday. The mistrust in Ferguson is rooted in history, but it’s also being deepened in real time. History tells us that justice is unlikely to be served in this case; the conduct of the local officials charged with investigating Brown’s death only signals to the community that this time will not be different. In that context, not staying home at night seems like the only way to ensure that it will be.

Michelle Goldberg: Tear Gas Is an Abortifacient. Why Won’t the Anti-Abortion Movement Oppose It?

A couple of years ago, when I was newly pregnant and reporting in the West Bank, some of my local colleagues insisted that I skip covering a protest at an Israeli checkpoint. At first, I was resistant to letting pregnancy stand in the way of my work, but they knew from experience that there might be tear gas, and tear gas, they said, causes miscarriages. [..]

This means it’s likely that police in Ferguson, Missouri, have been spraying abortion-causing chemicals on crowds of civilians. Recently at TheNation.com, Dani McClain wrote about the killing of black youth as a reproductive justice issue, one that goes to the heart of the rights of parents to raise their children in peace, safety and dignity. She’s correct, of course, but if the anti-abortion movement were actually concerned about the well-being of the unborn, then the violence in Ferguson would be a pro-life issue as well.

Arwa Mahdawi: Satire is dying because the internet is killing it

Facebook’s [satire] tag may prevent people believing Kim Jong-un was voted the sexiest man alive, but the damage is done

Forget self-driving cars or virtual reality nano-technology algorithms, the newest innovation to emerge from Silicon Valley is square brackets. Facebook is testing a “satire tag” that will clearly label fake news stories from well-known satire sites like the Onion as satire]. No longer will you need to rely on outdated technology such as common sense to realise that content like [Area Facebook User Incredibly Stupid is [satire], the square brackets will do it for you.

It should perhaps be noted that Facebook isn’t introducing the satire tag because it thinks we’re all morons, but rather because it knows we’re all morons. In a statement, the social network explained that it had “received feedback that people wanted a clearer way to distinguish satirical articles from others”.

“A popular government, without popular information, or the mean of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both,” declared James Madison, the author and champion of the Bill of Rights. “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

This is still the essential truth of an American experiment that can only be advanced toward the equal and inclusive justice that did not exist in Madison’s time by a broadly informed and broadly engaged citizenry. When journalists are harassed, intimidated, threatened and detained, the basic premise of democracy-that the great mass of people, armed with information and perspective, and empowered to act upon it, will set right that which is made wrong by oligarchs-is assaulted. [..]

What is at stake is a free and open society; and it is not enough that the most egregious wrongs have been identified and decried. The culture, the climate, in which those wrongs occur so frequently, must change. It must change because the journalism that goes to places like Ferguson, the gets behind the façade of institutions like the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, that demands accountability from street cops and presidents, is much more than an exercise in information gathering. It is the vital link that gives citizens the information they need to bend the arc of history toward justice. There is no middle ground in this regard. Americans are either going to defend speak-truth-to-power journalism and vibrant democracy-as part of a broad reassertion of First Amendment rights-or they are going to have to settle for propaganda and oligarchy.

David Cay Johnston: Highest earners making less, Social Security data show

The news should create common cause for custodians and CEOs to push for economic growth

It is getting much harder to earn big bucks in America, my new analysis of official wage data shows. [..]

Now why should the typical worker care about this trifecta of bad news for high earners? After all, just one worker in about 4,100 makes this kind of money. What does it possibly matter to ordinary Americans that bosses who make as much in a year as they may earn for a lifetime of labor are squeezed a bit?

It matters because falling pay at the top can become a powerful tool for change. U.S. representatives and senators may not care much what a typical constituent thinks, but they do care about what the highest-paid Americans think, because they donate to campaigns.

If those at the top come to see that they share the travails of most other Americans, it increases the prospect of government policy changes that will grow our economy. We need to invest in the future of America for our economy can grow, which will make everyone, from custodians to CEOs, better off.

Alex S. Vitale: How to End Militarized Policing

We can undo the policies facilitating police violence in Ferguson.

In the last week, the ACLU, Color of Change and even libertarian Senator Rand Paul have demanded that militarized policing in the United States be dialed back. While it is essential that major reductions in the high-tech military presence of police be enacted, real changes in the way communities of color are policed require much deeper shifts in the core mission and function of American police. [..]

Ultimately, what underlies most of these militarized forms of policing is a cynical politics of race that has perverted criminal justice policies; they are no longer about crime or justice, but instead the management of poor and non-white populations through ever-more-punitive practices. Michelle Alexander, in The New Jim Crow, describes how modern criminal justice policy was driven by a Republican effort to appeal to white voters in the South and then by Democrats hoping to inoculate themselves against charges (i.e., the notorious Willie Horton smear) of being soft on crime.

Eugene Robinson: The Ones Left Behind

The fire this time is about invisibility. Our society expects the police to keep unemployed, poorly educated African-American men out of sight and out of mind. When they suddenly take center stage, illuminated by the flash and flicker of Molotov cocktails, we feign surprise.

The proximate cause of the rioting in Ferguson, Mo., is the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was stopped, a witness has said, by a white policeman for walking in the street rather than on the sidewalk. Officer Darren Wilson shot Brown at least six times, according to a private autopsy and, reportedly, one conducted by the county medical examiner. Two of those bullets struck him in the head.

There we have the familiar narrative: another unarmed black man unjustly killed. Brown thus joins a long, sad list-Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, etc.-that seems to have no end.

This storyline is unassailable. Anyone who thinks race is not a factor in these fatal encounters should have to cite examples of unarmed young white men being killed by trigger-happy police or self-appointed vigilantes. Names and dates, please.

When the police won’t take no for an answer

The protests in Ferguson, Missouri, set off by a policeman’s shooting of an unarmed black teen last week, appear to be spinning out of control – not because crowds are rioting nightly but because law enforcement is operating as though they are in a war zone. Peaceful protesters are facing nothing short of a domestic army, armed with military equipment, waiting for a provocation.

As the protests progressed, the police have used noncompliance, or the failure to obey their every order, as their justification for whatever violence came next. That’s also the excuse that the police used to explain why an officer shot Michael Brown. They said the incident started because Brown didn’t comply with an order to move, so it is he who is to blame.

What happens if you don’t comply when the police give you an order? What rights do you really have? How free are you, really, when the authorities have weapons pointed at you or when they have the right to draw a weapon and use it with relative impunity?

David Sirota: Is Corruption a Constitutional Right?

Wall Street is one of the biggest sources of funding for presidential campaigns, and many of the Republican Party’s potential 2016 contenders are governors, from Chris Christie of New Jersey and Rick Perry of Texas to Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Scott Walker of Wisconsin. And so, last week, the GOP filed a federal lawsuit aimed at overturning the pay-to-play law that bars those governors from raising campaign money from Wall Street executives who manage their states’ pension funds.

In the case, New York and Tennessee’s Republican parties are represented by two former Bush administration officials, one of whose firms just won the Supreme Court case invalidating campaign contribution limits on large donors. In their complaint, the parties argue that people managing state pension money have a First Amendment right to make large donations to state officials who award those lucrative money management contracts.

Malcolm Harris: When your employer doesn’t consider you an employee

Workers have the right to know their true employment status

Do you have a job? It seems like a simple question, but millions of Americans aren’t quite sure one way or another. The growth of nontraditional employment means more and more people are doing what can be recognized as work without knowing their exact employment status. Between independent contracts and internships, firms are increasingly reliant on marginally attached workers, for whom it is hard to say what labor regulations apply.

A newly reproposed law seeks to fix this ambiguity by forcing businesses to clarify – in writing – whether their workers are employed or not. Introduced by Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., in May, the Payroll Fraud Prevention Act of 2014 (a reinvigorated attempt at a bill that stalled last year) would reform the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 to reduce employee misclassification. If the bill becomes law, it will define nonemployees – people engaged for labor or services who are not employees – and require firms to issue notices informing workers of their official classification, their rights under the law and options for seeking remedy if they think they have been misclassified. The act would go a long way to leveling the informational asymmetry that plagues the labor market.

It’s hard to believe, but almost six years have passed since the fall of Lehman Brothers ushered in the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Many people, myself included, would like to move on to other subjects. But we can’t, because the crisis is by no means over. Recovery is far from complete, and the wrong policies could still turn economic weakness into a more or less permanent depression.

In fact, that’s what seems to be happening in Europe as we speak. And the rest of us should learn from Europe’s experience.

Before I get to the latest bad news, let’s talk about the great policy argument that has raged for more than five years. It’s easy to get bogged down in the details, but basically it has been a debate between the too-muchers and the not-enoughers.

The too-muchers have warned incessantly that the things governments and central banks are doing to limit the depth of the slump are setting the stage for something even worse. Deficit spending, they suggested, could provoke a Greek-style crisis any day now – within two years, declared Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles some three and a half years ago. Asset purchases by the Federal Reserve would “risk currency debasement and inflation,” declared a who’s who of Republican economists, investors, and pundits in a 2010 open letter to Ben Bernanke.

Bina Shaw: Want to end sexual violence against women? Fix the men

A crisis of masculinity needs to be addressed in order to see a reduction in sexual violence against women.

The Global Summit to End Violence Against Women in Conflict took place in London in June 2014, with 1700 delegates from 129 countries and 79 ministers attending, drawing much-needed attention to the problem of women suffering sexual assault in war zones.

Yet as I studied the programme’s fringe events and followed the coverage in the news, I wondered what exactly a conference in London could truly do, beyond the call to action, to help women in places like Syria, Iraq, or Egypt, where women have suffered systematic rape and sexual assault as a “weapon of war”, as summit keynote speaker Angelina Jolie put it.

It’s vital to commit to tackling sexual violence in conflict and supporting victims, as the summit’s action statement outlined, as fresh conflicts erupt across the Middle East and South Asia. But while the summit stated its aim was to “end the use of rape and sexual violence in conflicts around the world”, it didn’t give more voice to key elements: honesty about the true origins of the violence – the skewed concept of masculinity in patriarchal societies, which operates in both war and peace – and the concomitant need to confront male perpetrators of violence against women with a prescription that goes beyond the conventional formulae of legal reform and punishment for sexual crimes.

Robert McImtyre: Walgreen Co. Did the Right Thing, But Most Corporations Won’t Without a Change in Tax Rules

I experienced a brief moment of joy when news broke last week that pharmacy chain Walgreens has, for now, set aside plans to invert, which is a euphemism for using paperwork to reincorporate as a foreign company for tax purposes. But my joy lasted for about one minute.

While Walgreen Co. has decided to remain American for tax purposes, a lot of what consumers buy in Walgreens drug stores may come from companies that are not such outstanding corporate citizens. The prescriptions you have filled there may be made by AbbVie, which plans to become a British company for tax purposes, or Mylan, which plans to become a Dutch company, or Pfizer which is also considering a corporate inversion.  [..]

But this is a distraction. Few American corporations actually pay anything close to 35 percent of their profits in federal income taxes thanks to all sorts of loopholes, and lowering the tax rate would accomplish nothing because the ultimate goal of many inversions is to shift profits to countries like Bermuda or the Cayman Islands where the tax rate is zero. So many companies are inverting to Ireland and the Netherlands because those countries have famously lax rules when it comes to using more paperwork to make profits appear to be earned in these zero-tax countries.

If this sounds a little complicated, well, that’s why it’s the sort of policy issue that Congress is supposed to resolve. It would be nice if everyone deciding which bananas or yogurt to buy could brush up on inversions and avoid companies that engage in these tax dodges, and perhaps these consumer discontent would pressure these companies to do the right thing as did Walgreen. But my guess is that this crisis will only grow worse until Congress and President Obama act to end it.

They say that one swallow doesn’t make a summer, and one Politico story certainly doesn’t make a campaign season. But if a recent article there is correct – if the Democratic Party’s strategy this year really is “Running as a Dem (while) sounding like a Republican” – then the party may be headed for a disaster of epic but eminently predictable proportions.

“It’s one thing for Democrats running in red parts of the country to sound like Republicans on the campaign trail,” writes Alex Isenstadt. “It’s another when Democrats running in purple or even blue territory try to do so. Yet that’s what’s happening in race after race this season.”

Red Dems

Certainly this isn’t true of every race. Populist Sen. Elizabeth Warren has been brought in to help with Senate contests in several red states, for example. And a recent commentary (in Politico, come to think of it) argued that “an ascendant progressive and populist movement … is on the verge of taking over the party.”

So which is it? Are Dems tacking left or veering right? The answer isn’t clear yet. But Isenstadt offers some worrisome anecdotes. He points to several Democratic candidates who are recycling Republican rhetoric, even in districts that went for Barack Obama in the 2012 election.

Barry Ritholtz: Celebrating Greenspan’s Legacy of Failure

On this day in 1987, Alan Greenspan became chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. This anniversary allows us to take a quick look at what followed over the next two decades. As it turned out, it was one of the most interesting and, to be blunt, weirdest tenures ever for a Fed chairman.

This was largely because of the strange ways Greenspan’s infatuation with the philosophy of Ayn Rand manifested themselves. He was a free marketer who loved to intervene in the markets, a chief bank regulator who seemingly failed to understand even the most basic premise of bank regulations.

The stock market was having a scorching year in 1987, up 44 percent during the first seven months of the year. Stocks peaked within weeks of Greenspan being sworn in. He was still settling into the job when Black Monday came along and U.S. markets plummeted 23 percent on Oct. 19.

Welcome to Wall Street, Mr. Chairman.

The contradictions between Greenspan’s philosophy and his actions led to many key events over his career. The ones that stand out the most in my mind are as follows:

Pamela Merritt: Ferguson is not a war zone. We need to talk about more than just Mike Brown

The tragic events here in Missouri could be the beginning of something. But we need to build a path toward reconciliation

A neighborhood just north of my home – Ferguson, Missouri – has been under siege by its own police force. Maybe it’s hard to imagine what that means if you’re not here … but it’s actually harder to come to grips with if you are.

The unrest, the vandalism and the looting that you’ve heard about from local, national and international newspeople? That happened to businesses that are part of the Ferguson community. The show of force that you saw on the news the other night? That all went down in neighborhoods where many of my friends work and live. Since Sunday, the afternoons and evenings of the mostly-black residents of Ferguson have been filled with protests and vigils in response to 18-year-old Michael Brown’s death at the hands of a police officer on Saturday, and they’ve endured long nights filled with shouting police and riot gear, with wooden bullets and teargas – and, early Wednesday morning, with a second man shot by a cop.

People I know faced down police dogs to participate in a peaceful protest outside of the Ferguson police department on Saturday. A friend spent hours trying to help young people get home Monday night after buses stopped running – and she ended up letting several stay overnight for fear that they may be targeted for violence if they remained outside. Major cleanup efforts are scheduled for Wednesday.

Michelle Chen: Even bright young immigrants don’t buy Obama’s executive action fail

Whatever unilateral intervention the president may take, it isn’t nearly enough to offset systematic betrayal

With an out-of-session Congress deadlocked over immigration reform and right-wing lawmakers hell-bent on “sealing the border”, the White House faces intense pressure to do something – anything – about immigration, after years of burying a civil rights crisis in a mire of political tone-deafness and jingoistic bombast.

Activists hope that President Obama will expand an existing program to shield undocumented youth from deportation and grant reprieves to their family members. But whatever unilateral action Obama may take, it won’t be nearly enough to offset the systematic betrayal of immigrant communities over the past six years, as the White House has dangled vague promises of reform while denying justice to millions of undocumented people and their families.

Even the young people who have obtained temporary protection aren’t necessarily comforted by the prospect of more executive intervention from Obama. After watching their communities get ripped apart by incarceration and deportation, they’re now not only pressing for relief, but demanding long overdue justice.