Tag: Opinion

The President is angry at Democrats who won’t support this trade deal.

He should be angry at Republicans who haven’t supported American workers. Their obduracy has worsened the potential impact of the deal.  

Congressional Republicans have refused to raise the minimum wage (whose inflation-adjusted value is now almost 25 percent lower than it was in 1968), expand unemployment benefits, invest in job training, enlarge the Earned Income Tax Credit, improve the nation’s infrastructure, or expand access to public higher education.

They’ve embraced budget austerity that has slowed job and wage growth. And they’ve continued to push “trickle-down” economics – keeping tax rates low for America’s richest, protecting their tax loopholes, and fighting off any attempt to raise taxes on wealthy inheritances to their level before 2000.

Now they – and the president – want a huge trade agreement that protects corporate investors but will lead to even more off-shoring of low-skilled American jobs.

Jeffrey Sachs: Defend Workers and the Environment Before Voting Fast Track

esident Barack Obama is making a full-court press for two new international business agreements, one with Asian-Pacific countries known as Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the other with European countries known as the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). To secure these, he is calling on Congress to pass Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), also known as “fast track,” so that when TPP and TTIP come up for a Congressional vote, they can only be voted up or down, without amendments.

Obama’s advocacy has included a recent report by his Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) on The Economics Benefits of U.S. Trade (pdf), and a visit to Nike headquarters in Oregon. At Nike, Obama portrayed opponents of Fast Track as “just wrong,” trying to preserve the status quo rather than join the 21st century. Yet the Democrats are so far not buying. They know that there is a lot of mischief and even danger lurking in TPP and TTIP as they are currently constituted, as both would give too much power to multinational companies at the expense of workers and regulators.

Ralph Nader: Auto Safety: Past Is Prologue

It doesn’t take a comprehensive examination of American culture to notice the all-too-commonplace glorification of war. Violent war movies and television shows routinely make big bucks for Hollywood. Video games called Call of Duty and Battlefield sell millions of copies each year. Even history books are filled with stories of “great” battles won and lost. There are even devoted Civil War reenactors!

We are quick to recognize and commemorate wars that took enormous amounts of human lives through acts of intentional violence from opposing sides. It is unfortunately quite rare to see the same public attention dedicated to campaigns where preserving human life was the only true objective.

Mary Turck: Stop the blame game over achievement gap

We need to invest in programs that help students learn and succeed, not argue about who’s responsible for failure

Debates about the shortcomings of K-12 education in the United States typically focus on identifying who or what is to blame for the achievement gap – the lower standardized test scores and high school graduation rates among students of color and those living in poverty. Often these discussions are not only misguided but also ignore strategies that lead to success in school, even for children who are living in poverty, discouraged by racism and inequality and stressed by family and community dysfunction. We need to learn from and replicate these initiatives instead of blame and shame schools, teachers and communities for gaps in achievement.

Students from low-income and minority backgrounds live with stress that affects individual learning and classroom behavior. For example, a study designed to identify stress in New York schoolchildren after 9/11 found that “the students’ sense of threat or insecurity stemmed not so much from terrorism as from exposure to violence, inadequate housing, sudden family loss, parents with depression or addictions and so forth.”

The United States has its second universal periodic review (UPR) before the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday. Countries will be able to ask the U.S. questions and make recommendations about its implementation of human rights commitments made during its first review, which took place in 2010, as well as about other issues of concern.

At the top of the list should be Washington’s failure to hold accountable those responsible for the systematic torture carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency in the global “war on terrorism.” Five years ago, the U.S. accepted a UPR recommendation from Denmark to “take measures to eradicate” and “thoroughly investigate” all forms of torture and abuse by military or civilian personnel within its jurisdiction. But the only investigation into CIA torture conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice was limited in scope and closed in 2012 with no charges filed. Nor does it seem to have met basic standards of credibility or thoroughness; investigators apparently never bothered to interview key witnesses of the abuse: the detainees.

Zoë Carpenter: Rand Paul Is Fighting for Your Privacy-Unless You’re a Woman

“The right to be left alone is the most cherished of rights,” Kentucky senator and presidential aspirant Rand Paul said over the weekend in San Francisco. He was there to sell himself to the young tech elite as a civil-liberties crusader; the only candidate willing to take an uncompromising stand against government surveillance. He cares so deeply about privacy that he’s planning to filibuster the renewal of parts of the Patriot Act.

But the leader of “the leave-me-the-hell-alone coalition” is simultaneously, albeit more quietly, arguing that women should have little privacy in their healthcare decisions. “The government does have some role in our lives,” Paul said at a summit organized by the anti-choice Susan B Anthony List in April, by which he meant making abortion illegal. Paul describes himself as “100 percent pro-life.” Along with all of the other Republican presidential candidates he supports a bill that resurfaced this week in the House that would ban abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Recently Paul has become something of a champion for anti-abortion groups that are trying to reframe the abortion debate so that pro-choice views seem extreme. Pressed by reporters last month to clarify whether his support for abortion bans includes exceptions, Paul deflected the question by calling up the specter of late-term abortions. “Why don’t we ask the DNC: Is it OK to kill a seven-pound baby in the uterus?” he said to a New Hampshire journalist. No matter that only 1 percent of abortions in the United States occur after 21 weeks of pregnancy; claiming Democrats endorse the “killing” of babies is an easy way not to account for his selective support for personal liberty.

Kate Aronoff: Movement Builders Should Listen to Bernie Sanders – Focus on Mass Action, not Candidates

Is Bernie Sanders a more progressive presidential candidate than Hillary Clinton? Undoubtedly. Will he single-handedly catalyze a united left front in the United States? Probably not.

Unchallenged, Hillary Clinton is likely to run a campaign chock-full of populist optics, but thin on any real engagement with the issues that make progressives most nervous about her bid: foreign policy, welfare, corporate influence and more. Sanders, a registered independent, who caucuses with Democrats yet identifies as a democratic socialist, has been unafraid to talk about class inequality, even – heaven forbid – capitalism. He’s even started bringing a long-taboo word back into mainstream American political conversation: socialism.

As Ned Resnikoff points out for Al Jazeera, Americans’ stance toward socialism has been thawing since the Cold War. Between Occupy Wall Street, Kshama Sewant’s election to Seattle City Council, and – now – Sanders’ candidacy, it may finally be possible to de-link the “S Word” from the gulags and authoritarianism of the Soviet Union, and re-associate with such basic amenities as healthcare, education and housing. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, 49 percent of 18-29 year olds even have a positive view of socialism. With any hope, this year’s Democratic primary debates will challenge Clinton to choose firm sides on these issues, and maybe even build them into her platform in response to the vocal minority more endeared to Sanders’ populism than Clinton’s smug establishmentarianism.

A basic moral principle that most Americans agree on is no one who works full time should be in poverty, nor should their family.

Yet over time we’ve seen significant growth in the “working poor” – people working full time, sometimes even 60 or more hours each week, but at such low wages that they remain impoverished.

What to do?

One step is to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. This is winnable. A powerful movement is fighting for $15 an hour and they’re winning new laws in cities and states, and forcing companies to raise wages.

Wendell Potter: Court Case Shows How Health Insurers Rip Off You And Your Employer

If you think you’re paying too much for employer-sponsored health coverage, you might want to forward this to the HR department. It’s possible, maybe even likely, that your health insurer has been ripping off both you and your employer-to the tune of several million dollars every year-for decades.

Many Americans, according to various polls, blame Obamacare for every hike in premiums despite the fact that the rate of increase for most folks was actually greater before 2010, the year the law went into effect.

Health insurers are delighted that many folks blame Obamacare for rate increases because it deflects attention away from them and, according to documents made public in a recent lawsuit against a big Blue Cross plan, the questionable activities they’ve been engaging in for years to boost profits.

It turns out that one of the reasons workers have been paying more for their coverage is allegedly a common practice among insurers: charging their employer customers unlawful hidden fees.

John Dear: Everyone Has to Practice Nonviolence Now

The death of unarmed Freddie Gray in police custody and the subsequent riots in Baltimore demonstrate the profound systemic injustice in our country, as well as the complete misunderstanding and widespread hypocrisy about nonviolence.

Everyone has to practice nonviolence. Everyone. From the people on the streets to the police, to church ministers and parents, but also our media spokespeople and elected officials. Including the president. And the military. Everyone, everywhere. The days of war, killing, shootings, bombings, torture, executions and nuclear weapons are coming to an end. The days of violence are over. Everyone has to practice nonviolence. That is our only future–if we are to have a future. [..]

After Baltimore, Ferguson, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the evidence is in. Violence has failed. The days of violence and war are over. Dr. King and Gandhi were right; nonviolence is our only option.

Every one of us has to start practicing nonviolence. If we all take up where Gandhi and King left off, we can build a new grassroots movement of nonviolence that will lead to a new culture of peace.

Last year the vampires of finance bought themselves a Congress. I know it’s not nice to call them that, but I have my reasons, which I’ll explain in a bit. For now, however, let’s just note that these days Wall Street, which used to split its support between the parties, overwhelmingly favors the G.O.P. And the Republicans who came to power this year are returning the favor by trying to kill Dodd-Frank, the financial reform enacted in 2010.

And why must Dodd-Frank die? Because it’s working.

This statement may surprise progressives who believe that nothing significant has been done to rein in runaway bankers. And it’s true both that reform fell well short of what we really should have done and that it hasn’t yielded obvious, measurable triumphs like the gains in insurance thanks to Obamacare.

But Wall Street hates reform for a reason, and a closer look shows why.

Alexander Abdo and Jameel Jaffer: The courts stood up to NSA mass surveillance. Now Congress must act

One of the documents that Edward Snowden delivered to American journalists two years ago was a now-infamous NSA slide titled “New Collection Posture.” The slide summarizes, in surprisingly candid terms, the objective of the largest, most powerful surveillance agency on the face of the earth. ‘Collect it all’, it says. [..]

But perhaps the more immediate effect of Thursday’s decision will be on the debate now unfolding in Washington. The Patriot Act provision that underlies the call-records program is scheduled to sunset on 1 June, and over the next three weeks Congress must decide whether to reauthorize the provision, scale it back or allow it to expire. The appeals court’s decision should strengthen the hand of advocates who believe the revisions currently being considered by Congress don’t go far enough, and it should strengthen the resolve of legislators who have been pushing for more comprehensive reforms.

If Congress can’t coalesce around more comprehensive reform, the best course would be to let Section 215 expire. The intelligence community hasn’t even attempted to make a serious case that this authority is actually necessary. And as the recent ruling reminds us, it’s an authority that’s been grossly abused already and that could readily be abused again.

The court has done its part. Now it’s Congress’s turn.

Leo W. Gerard: Trade Abuse

America is in an abusive relationship with trade-obsessed politicians and corporations.

Despite their long history of battering the U.S. middle class with bad trade deal after bad trade deal, these lawmakers and CEOs contend workers should believe that their new proposal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), will be different. President Obama and the CEO of Nike, a company that doesn’t manufacture one shoe in the United States, got together in Oregon on Friday to urge Americans to fall once again for a trade deal.  

The trade fanatics say everything will be different under the TPP – even though it is based on deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that lured American factories across the border, destroyed good-paying jobs and devastated communities. They plead: “Just come back for one more deal and see how great it will be this time!” And, like all batterers, they say: “Sorry about the terrible past; trust me about the future.”

This is trade abuse.

Dave Hohnson: Senate Fast Track Vote Tuesday — Where Is Clinton?

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has scheduled the voting process for trade promotion authority, commonly known as “fast track,” to begin as early as Tuesday. If passed, fast track prohibits Congress from amending trade agreements, no matter what problems might show up, and it requires that these agreements be voted on within 90 days, limiting the debate Congress is allowed to have while also prohibiting filibusters.

Passing fast track will essentially pre-approve the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “trade” agreement before the public gets a chance to know what is in it, as well as future trade deals, regardless of who is president or what the rigged, corporate-dominated negotiating process produces.

With a vote coming as soon as Tuesday, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has not yet spoken out for or against fast track.

Geoffrey R. Stone: Intelligence Gathering, Secrecy and the Congress Problem

In an important decision, a federal court of appeals held yesterday that the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone metadata could not be squared with the legislation that was said to authorize it. [..]

But that left open the question, which is still unresolved, of how Congress itself can authorize programs that must be kept secret from our enemies and, therefore, from the American people. One answer, of course, is that the government should never have any foreign intelligence programs that have not been discussed openly and approved by the American people. The problem with that answer is that that “solution” would automatically render eliminate all sorts of surveillance programs that require secrecy in order to be effective.

Another answer is to figure out some way that Congress can have a meaningful role in deciding whether to approve secret foreign intelligence programs without at the same time destroying their effectiveness. That, of course, was the reason for creating the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. But, if their approval is not sufficient to reflect congressional approval, then another way must be found to enable the Congress itself to discuss, debate, review and evaluate secret foreign intelligence programs without destroying them in the process.

If the Scottish National Party was a small anti-austerity party that had never before made a real dent in British politics and suddenly shot into contention-grabbing dozens of seats away from the traditional parties and elbowing its way into position as the third largest party in new Parliament-the world would take notice.

Well, the Scottish National Party is a small-make that formerly small – anti-austerity party. And it just made a real dent, a huge dent, in politics with an epic electoral breakthrough. “The tectonic plates of Scottish politics shifted yesterday,” said SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon on Friday morning. The veteran British political commentator Andrew Marr declared as the election results came in that, “Scotland has moved decisively to the left.”

That move offers an important lesson for American progressives about going big in politics-especially anti-austerity politics. It is not just possible to run against the failed conservative policies of seeking to balance budgets with cuts to public services, attacks on public employees and their unions, and crude policies of privatization that redistribute wealth upward. It is necessary.

Leslie Savan: Who’s Really Laughing About the Invasion of Texas?

All week long we’ve been having a good laugh over Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordering the Texas state guard to monitor Jade Helm 15, a military exercise planned by the Pentagon to simulate “covert military operations” in Texas and seven other western states. The conspiracy theory on the right is that the operation is designed to “take over” Texas, which is funny because the state is actually already part of the US. The speculation that abandoned Walmart stores are being prepped to hold gun-lovers and patriots makes it only more hilarious because, well, don’t Walmarts already do that? [..]

But as Jon Stewart points out, these military exercises have been going on in Texas for years, and the Lone Star state has always welcomed them. Hmmm, what’s different now, he wonders, under a photo of our black president.

This is how ginning up the base works. If there’s a near-time analog, it would be the 24/7 coverage before the 2014 midterm elections about Ebola and the crazies’ theory that the feds were encouraging an epidemic in America by not quarantining anyone who set foot in West Africa. That was a bad joke, too, since, after all, nobody who had not been in West Africa or treated someone with Ebola had ever caught the disease. And the media coverage stopped on a dime when the election was over.

But, boy, did that coverage help drive racially biased voters to the polls.

Michele Chen: Devaluation of black lives starts in classrooms

Black students are disproportionately subjected to suspension and arrest

In New York City, where youth of color live under the shadow of stop-and-frisk policing and hundreds of children are jailed each year, school authorities recently promised to limit the use of metal handcuffs on students younger than 12 years old – unless absolutely necessary. Yes, that’s considered progress.

Since the Black Lives Matter movement exploded last year, the public spotlight has focused on violence against black youth in the streets. But the devaluation of black life often begins in the classroom – not at the hands of riot police, but through more subtle forms of force.

Black students are disproportionately subjected to disciplinary measures, ranging from suspension and expulsion to physical confinement or restraint – and sometimes arrest. Like zero-tolerance law enforcement, social control is the goal, though paradoxically, those disproportionately targeted for restraint typically come from the most disempowered communities.

For many middle class families in Oregon and around the country, our economic recovery has not translated into higher wages or the availability of better-paying jobs. Nationwide, many Americans who are working hard and playing by the rules are still struggling.

Two decades of failed U.S. trade policy is one reason. At issue is not whether to trade, but under what rules. For workers, the environment and the health of American families, getting the rules right is essential. [..]

Time and again, we’ve been promised the next trade deal will mean increased exports and more jobs. Since 1993, and the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), our nation has lost 5 million manufacturing jobs — including 11 percent of Oregon’s manufacturing jobs — and seen trade surpluses with our biggest trading partners turn into large deficits. [..]

The administration has called people like me trade alarmists. I believe trade can be done right. The U.S. is the world’s largest economy and we should use that power to implement truly high standard, enforceable trade agreements. But fast track and TPP fall flat. Let’s not miss perhaps the last opportunity we have to make U.S. trade policy work for Oregonians and all Americans.

Robert Reich: Making the Economy Work for the Many, Not the Few — Step 1: Raise the Minimum Wage

A basic moral principle that most Americans agree on is no one who works full time should be in poverty, nor should their family.

Yet over time we’ve seen significant growth in the “working poor” — people working full time, sometimes even 60 or more hours each week, but at such low wages that they remain impoverished.

What to do?

Sen. Bernie Sanders: Break Up Big Banks

During the financial crisis of 2008, the American people were told that they needed to bailout huge financial institutions because those institutions were “too big to fail.”

Yet, today, three out of the four financial institutions in this country (JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo) are 80 percent larger today than they were on September 30, 2007, a year before the taxpayers of this country bailed them out. 80 percent! [..]

Today, just six huge financial institutions have assets of nearly $10 trillion which is equal to nearly 60 percent of GDP. These huge banks handle more than two-thirds of all credit card purchases, write over 35 percent of the mortgages, and control nearly half of all bank deposits in this country.

If Teddy Roosevelt were alive today, do you know what he would say? He would say break ’em up. And he would be right. And that’s exactly what I plan to do.

“What do you hope to accomplish with this protest,” I asked a 13-year-old girl marching in Staten Island, N.Y., last August, protesting the police killing of Eric Garner.

“To live until I’m 18,” the young teen, named Aniya, replied. Could that possibly be the American dream today?

Aniya went on: “You want to get older. You want to experience life. You don’t want to die in a matter of seconds because of cops.” It’s that sentiment that has fueled the Black Lives Matter movement across the country.

Most recently, a week of protest in Baltimore was largely quelled when a remarkable prosecutor announced that six police officers would be charged in the death of Freddie Gray. Marilyn Mosby, the 35-year-old state’s attorney for the city of Baltimore, is the youngest lead prosecutor in any major U.S. city. Just 100 days into office, she made national headlines on Friday, May 1, with the stunning announcement that the officers would face various charges, from assault to second-degree murder. [..]

With determination like this, demanding accountability for all, maybe Aniya will get her wish: to celebrate her 18th birthday, and many, many more.

Dave Johnson: Enormous, Humongous March Trade Deficit Creating Jobs Elsewhere

The U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday (pdf) that the March goods and services trade deficit was $51.4 billion. This was an increase of $15.5 billion, or 43.1 percent, from the revised figure of $35.9 billion in February.

March exports were $187.8 billion, up $1.6 billion from February. March imports were $239.2 billion, up $17.1 billion from February.

The monthly U.S. goods deficit with China increased in March to $37.8 billion, up from $27.3 billion in February. This is the highest monthly deficit with China on record.

The U.S. goods deficit with Japan increased in March to $6.3 billion, up from $4.3 billion in February. [..]

t’s time to change our trade policies so they work for We the People not just a few already-wealthy people. We should demand balance. Trade partners should agree to actually “trade” with us, not just sell to us. We should also balance the interests of working people, the environment and other stakeholders with the interests of businesses in our trade negotiations. We should set a priority of lifting wages and prosperity on all sides of trade borders, instead of a priority of lifting only the world’s 1 percent.

Democracy and transparency can work for all of us. All of us do better when all of us do better.

Ezekiel J. Emanuel: How to Solve the E.R. Problem

Back in 2009, a big selling point of health care reform was the idea that expanding insurance coverage would increase Americans’ access to preventive and primary care and decrease the unnecessary use of emergency rooms, saving billions. President Obama said it this way: “One of the areas where we can potentially see some saving is a lot of those patients are being seen in the emergency room anyway, and if we are increasing prevention, if we are increasing wellness programs, we’re reducing the amount of emergency room care.”

There is one big problem with this logic: data. A new survey by the American College of Emergency Physicians found that 75 percent of emergency room doctors reported increases in patient volume since the Affordable Care Act went into effect. [..]

In Seattle, an unusual partnership seems to have found a solution. Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, a nonprofit that provides health care and insurance, and SEIU Healthcare NW Health Benefits Trust, which delivers health benefits to thousands of home health care workers, have reduced emergency room use among a subset of the trust’s membership by 27 percent over four years. [..]

The partnership realized that providing insurance was not enough. Instead it adopted a four-pronged strategy.

Once a global beacon, the American press has suffered from scandal, unpopularity and government crackdowns

While American journalists have long been hailed as flag bearers of the profession – able to report, write and broadcast in mostly ideal circumstances – in the past two decades or more, we have seen a number of cases of fabrication by journalists who have shamed the profession at large and undermined public trust. The more journalism loses popular support, the greater the leverage the public and government officials have to restrict press freedom.

No longer can U.S.media ignore the issue of press freedom and point fingers at other nations for their poor records. Today journalists in the United States are under fire more than ever.

In 2015 the United States’ ranking in the Reporters Without Borders index of press freedom dropped from 20 in 2010 to 49 – four steps above Haiti. Placing higher than the United States: Namibia, Latvia, Suriname, El Salvador, Samoa and Burkina Faso.

The reason for the drop? Frequent attacks on journalists by the public and law enforcement during demonstrations and other high-profile events, threats against journalists who refuse to reveal their sources and the government’s failure to pass a federal shield law protecting journalists.

Sarah Knuckey and Hina Shamsi:

In releasing information on April 23 about a drone strike that killed two western hostages in Pakistan in January, the Obama administration demonstrated that it is able and willing to acknowledge responsibility for strikes, carry out investigations into them, and publicly offer compensation to victims’ families.

This approach should be the rule rather than the exception.

But to the families of hundreds of Pakistani and Yemeni victims of US drone strikes, the United States has offered only silence. President Obama stated that he decided to release information about the January strike because “the Weinstein and Lo Porto families deserve to know the truth.” They certainly do. And so do Yemeni and Pakistani families who have lost their loved ones and who thus far have been denied even simple acknowledgment. The contrast is glaring, unfair, and likely to increase the already strong anti-American sentiment the lethal force program has caused abroad.

These limited disclosures also underscore the urgent need for meaningful oversight and implementation of reforms – including restrictions on the killing authority that President Obama announced in 2013, but from which he then partially exempted the CIA’s strikes in Pakistan.

Michele Simon: Meat lobby peddles doubt to undermine dietary guidelines

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, updated every five years, never fails to cause a stir. For the current revision, released in February, a federally appointed scientific committee – after a two-year review of the latest research and numerous public hearings – has recommended (PDF) lowering consumption of red meat and processed meat.

Despite being fairly tepid, this advice set off a media firestorm, driven by a defensive meat industry and others who have been muddying the waters for some time on the role of meat in the diet. The meat lobby is taking full advantage of the current “debate.” [..]

Most of the discourse around red meat has largely focused on two issues: whether or not saturated fat is unfairly vilified as contributing to heart disease, and how, despite lowering their intake of red meat, Americans continue to gain weight.

The nutritionally myopic approach to meat-eating’s relationship to heart disease and obesity plays right into the meat lobby’s game. It’s a strategy honed by the tobacco industry decades ago: Create enough doubt to maintain the status quo – in this case, the promotion of red meat by the federal government.

Jessica Valenti: To make a 10-year-old give birth isn’t just horrifying – it’s life threatening

Would anyone in their right mind think it reasonable that a 10-year-old carry a pregnancy to term? This is not a thought experiment but the horrible story of a real child in Paraguay: raped by her stepfather and now denied an abortion.

According to Amnesty International – which is leading the charge to obtain an abortion for the child – the young girl’s condition became public when she went to the hospital complaining of stomach pain and was found to be 21 weeks pregnant. [..]

Paraguay has very strict laws on abortion – the procedure is only permitted when a person’s life is at risk. There are no exceptions for rape or incest.

Antonio Barrios, the Health Minister of Paraguay, said: “there is no indication that the health of the [girl] is at risk … therefore we are not, from any point of view, in favor of the termination of the pregnancy”.

There are so many levels of horror here it’s hard to know where to begin but this, perhaps, is the most baffling: in what universe is a 10-year-old delivering a child not a risk to her life?

About a year ago I read an eloquent and powerful article on Cinco de Mayo by Sudie Hoffman at the Zinn Educational Project. In this must-read blog post, Hoffman correctly names the damaging ethnic stereotypes embodied in the commercial appropriation of this day as it is celebrated in the United States. [..]

Why do we do this? Why do good, thoughtful people who would never think to celebrate African American culture with fried chicken, watermelons, and Sambo figurines nevertheless feel it perfectly appropriate to “honor” Mexico with racist tropes?

I don’t have an answer to this. I hate to think people actually believe those stereotypes, but it’s likely some do. Or maybe they simply don’t stop to think about how hurtful and damaging those kinds of images can be.

On the other hand, there is a reason Cinco de Mayo came to the U.S., and it wasn’t to celebrate a dictator. In the 1960s Chicano activists thought that this day might become a bridge to better understanding and acceptance of Mexican Americans in the United States, and a window to authentic Mexican culture. It didn’t turn out that way, but there is no reason we cannot return to that initial intent.

Dean Baker: Celebrating the Flash Crash with a Wall Street Sales Tax

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the flash crash. For those who don’t remember, the Flash Crash was when the stock market lost almost nine percent of its value from its opening level, with most of this decline occurring in a five-minute period.  [..]

The issue of short-term trading is the key here. There was no event in the world that triggered the plunge. There was no outbreak of war, major terrorist incident, or natural disaster that sent stock prices plummeting. There wasn’t even a bad profit report from a major company. The crash was based simply on program trading that fed back on itself, turning a downward blip into a major plunge. [..]

The traders now siphon off more than $200 billion (1.3 percent of GDP) a year from the productive economy. Much of this money is the income of super-rich bankers and hedge fund partners.

There is a simple and easy way to reduce the amount of money being drained away by short-term traders. A financial transactions tax, effectively a modest sales tax applied to trades, would drastically reduce the amount of short-term trading while raising a huge amount of revenue.

Jason Downs: How Do We Prevent Another Freddie Gray?

Telling the truth requires courage. Lying is easy. Telling half-truths is the coward’s way out. But telling the truth in the face of adversity calls for great courage. Accepting the truth, especially when this truth offends your sensibilities, requires even greater courage.

Discussing Freddie Gray’s homicide without discussing race is as incomplete as discussing the history of the United States without discussing slavery. It’s a half-truth. [..]

Once the truth is known, once dirty little secrets are revealed, the frustration shown yesterday is better understood, which is not the same as condoning any more violence. Freddie Gray’s homicide was not an isolated incident; it was the tipping point. That said, the question now is how to honor this truth?

How do we prevent another Freddie Gray? How do we prevent explosions of community anger and frustration that burn down portions of our city?

Wendell Potter: Why Health Insurers May Be Destined to Follow Blockbuster Into Irrelevance

Remember Blockbuster?

In its heyday — which wasn’t so long ago — Blockbuster had 60,000 employees and 9,000 locations. For most Americans, for a minute anyway, it was the place to rent a movie. Then along came Netflix. And Redbox, which operates most of the movie-rental kiosks in convenience and grocery stores. [..]

What will be the next Blockbuster? It very well might be your health insurance company, says Steven Brill, the entrepreneur and journalist whose 26,000-word Time magazine cover story about the absurdly high costs of American health care captured the nation’s attention two years ago.

“I see insurance companies as the weak players” in the U.S. health care system, Brill told me in a recent interview. By that he meant that insurers have become increasingly impotent middlemen in the battle to rein in health care costs. [..]

Hospitals will have to be regulated in ways they haven’t been regulated before, he says. There will need to be standard-of-care regulations. And limits on profit margins.

Brill believes that if those and other regulations can be put in place, quality of care will go up and costs will come down. If they aren’t, however, we may be worse off than we are now.