Tag: Opinion

Sony, which spent weeks holding itself out as a free speech martyr after North Korea allegedly hacked its emails, is now trying to do more damage to the spirit of the First Amendment than North Korea ever did. The corporation is using high-powered lawyers and lobbyists in an attempt to stifle the rights of media organizations to publish newsworthy information already in the public domain. Ironically, some of those emails include Sony and the MPAA’s attempts to censor the Internet on a much larger scale.

Sony’s lawyer, David Boies, has spent the week sending out a hyperbolic letter to various news organizations, pressuring them to avert their eyes from the hacked email trove that WikiLeaks published on its site last week. Boies, while misleadingly claiming that journalists could be breaking US law by even looking at the emails, also said if media organizations refused to write stories about them, they would somehow be “protecting the First Amendment.”

The head of the MPAA and former Democratic Senator Chis Dodd went a step further yesterday, outrageously suggesting the US government should go after WikiLeaks in some fashion for re-publishing the emails.

Jon Stotz: The New Sponsor of Terrorism: Climate Change

For years, we have been warned that climate change would lead to a less stable world, with some very serious implications for the United States, its military, and its security. Beginning in 2010, in its Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon warned that while climate change “alone does not cause conflict, it may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries around the world.”

This was followed up in 2014, when the Pentagon once again warned that the effects of climate change are “threat multipliers that 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.”

Finally, this year, a groundbreaking study concluded that the Zero Hour had come. Climate change, indeed, contributed to conditions that hastened the rise of extremism, in the form of ISIS, in Syria.

Mark Weisbrot: European officials may be pushing regime change in Greece

Destabilization efforts are causing economic damage

There are various narratives for what is happening to Greece as another deadline looms – the April 24 gathering of eurozone finance ministers in Riga, Latvia – and European officials show no sign of compromise. The most common tale is that this is a game of brinkmanship, with the Germans and their allies pushing for “reforms” that the Syriza government in Greece doesn’t want to adopt. Most of the media seems more partial to the European officials than to Greece. But even among those who are more neutral or sympathetic to Greece, it is still a story about hardline European officials threatening to use their control over funding to the Greek government and banking system in order to bring Greece to its knees.

But this narrative misses the elephant in the middle of the negotiating table: While the Greek government cannot do anything to replace its negotiating partners with people more to their liking, the European officials on the other side seem to believe they can do exactly that. And it is becoming increasingly clear that this is their current strategy.

The exploitation of a precious natural resource by multinational companies is degrading the environment. Consumers shouldn’t fall for it

Thanks to consumer culture it’s entirely possible to give the Earth a surreptitious kicking on a daily basis. So using face scrubs full of plastic microbeads or disposable wipes just make you look like you’re time efficient and keen to exfoliate (no mention that you’re irreversibly polluting the ocean).

Perhaps the most egregious of all these behaviours is our ongoing commitment to bottled water.

There’s an obvious idiocy here. In the UK our hydration needs can be met from a source that is rigorously tested by the Drinking Water Inspectorate and operates in a supremely low-carbon way (the common carriage of water mains is comparatively efficient and uses little energy). You call it a tap, or a faucet, and it’s one of those shiny things that augments the kitchen sink. Try it. You might like it.

I fear I’m fighting a losing battle. The multinationals invested in bottled water represent some of the biggest companies on earth. We’re sitting ducks. When the market for sugar-sweetened carbonated soft drinks began to decline in the late 1990s giants such as Coca-Cola and PepsiCo knew their future lay in flogging water.

Katie McDonough: Women lose out – again: Why the Senate’s human trafficking compromise is nothing to celebrate

Senate leadership announced a deal to advance the anti-trafficking bill. Once again, women became bargaining chips

Senate leadership announced Tuesday that a deal had been reached over the anti-abortion language in an otherwise bipartisan anti-human trafficking bill. The agreement means that the measure will advance, and clears the way for a long delayed confirmation vote on attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked the vote on Lynch in order to force action on the Justice for Victims of Human Trafficking Act after a dispute over a provision that would have expanded the Hyde Amendment stalled the process. Minority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday that the compromise “rejects the expansion of the Hyde language… where it didn’t apply before,” according to a report from U.S. News & World Report. [..]

While disagreement over the Hyde language – an amendment would have prohibited a victims compensation fund from being used for abortions, the first time Hyde would have applied to non-taxpayer revenue – clouded the bill’s prospects, many victims’ advocates had other issues with the bill and urged Congress to do better.

Kate D’Adamo, national policy advocate at the Urban Justice Center’s Sex Workers Project, told Emily Crockett at RH Reality Check that while she supports the provisions of the measure establishing a federal advisory council made up of trafficking survivors and expanding a federal victims support initiative, these positive elements are stuck in a “rotten apple” of a bill.

Amanda Marcotte: [10 egregious myths the religious perpetuate about atheists, debunked ]

Nonbelievers do not lack a basic moral code — despite what the likes of David Brooks might have you believe

In a regular poll conducted by political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell on American political attitudes, atheists recently lost their spot as as the most disliked group in America to the Tea Party. Still, number two is simply way too high in the unpopularity rankings for a group of people who just happen to spend Sunday mornings in bed instead of in church. Polling data shows that nearly half of Americans would disapprove if their child married an atheist and nearly 40 percent of Americans don’t see atheists as sharing their vision of American society, numbers that outstripped similar prejudices toward Muslims and African Americans.

Of course, the real reason atheists are so hated has little to do with jealousy for all their free time, but largely because most Americans are better acquainted with myths than with the realities of atheists’ lives. Unfortunately, atheists often have these myths tossed in their faces, usually by believers who would rather talk about what they heard atheists are like rather than uncomfortable subjects such as the lack of proof for any gods.

These myths do more than hurt atheists. They also harm the basic religious freedoms of all Americans, regardless of their beliefs. Religious freedom and tolerance don’t mean much if they can’t be expanded to include those without religion. With that in mind, here’s 10 of the ugliest myths about atheists, debunked:

Jessica Valenti: Republicans who limit what medical students can learn doom us to stupid doctors

Some legislators want to keep women from having abortions by prohibiting anyone from teaching doctors how to perform one

Most people expect their physicians to be smart – skillful, schooled and, perhaps above all else, knowledgable. So it’s somewhat baffling (and entirely infuriating) that some Republicans want to keep important medical knowledge from soon-to-be doctors.

A North Carolina bill introduced this month would prevent state medical school departments from allowing employees to perform abortions or to “supervise the performance of an abortion”. Essentially, the bill’s sponsors and supporters wants to make teaching how to perform an abortion – a safe, legal and necessary medical procedure – illegal. As The New Republic’s Jamil Smith wrote, if passed, the bill would “produce less intelligent doctors.”

But the more a doctor knows and learns, the more people they can help throughout her career – and no one would choose a doctor who bragged about skipping class. Bills like this must be defeated – and every medical student in the country with a obstetrical and gynecological (OBGYN) focus should be taught how to perform abortions.

Last week the House Republicans took an amazing vote. They literally voted to take food from the mouths of hungry children in order to give a huge tax break to children who were born with a silver spoon in theirs — the sons and daughters of multi-millionaires.

I am not exaggerating. The GOP voted to eliminate the estate tax. But the estate tax only applies to estates larger than $5.4 million for an individual and $10.9 million for couples. Eliminating the estate tax would benefit only 5,500 families in America (.02 percent of the population). And 75 percent of the benefits would flow to children who inherit estates of $20 million or more.

And some of those are huge fortunes. Eight Americans earned $10 billion in income in 2013 alone. That’s enough income to pay 200,000 average American workers.

Jeff Biggers: There would be more regulation of coal mining if it didn’t just affect ‘hillbillies’

For many in central Appalachia, the fight against reckless strip mining operations recalls a popular t-shirt in West Virginia: “Save the Endangered Hillbilly.” It’s not really a joke; decades of contempt and disregard for rural mountaineers underscore an existence no less threatened than local wildlife.

Appalachia has become a code word for our nation’s sacrifice zones. “Coal mining has been destroying human and wildlife communities in Appalachia for more than 100 years”, according to Tierra Curry, a southeastern Kentucky native and a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. The Center’s lawsuit against the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 2012 resulted in a recent proposal to list two species of fish impacted by mining under the Endangered Species Act. [..]

This disregard for the inhabitants of the region is a big reason why – despite a mounting health and humanitarian crisis – there has still not been federal intervention to put an end to the public health disaster wreaked by mountaintop removal mining.

GAry Younge: The Cornel West-Michael Eric Dyson feud is petty. Black people are dying in the streets

Shortly before the last presidential election, Columbia political science professor, Fred Harris, bemoaned in an essay: “Were Harold Cruse, the author of the unsparing 1967 book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, still alive, he would despair at the state of black intellectual life.” [..]

As if on cue, Michael Eric Dyson, of Georgetown University, published a searing take-down of Cornel West, formerly of Harvard and Princeton and now at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, in The New Republic on Sunday bemoaning West’s “dramatic plummet from his perch as a world-class intellectual”. [..]

At the best of times this would be an internal dispute between two well-paid tenured professors that barely resonated beyond the academe and made precious little impact within it. But these are not the best of times. Black people are being shot dead in the street almost daily by trigger-happy cops and two ostensibly smart men, who have both produced excellent work and who pride themselves on being engaged academics responsive to the needs of the black community, are firing broadsides at each other.

“Don’t you think they want us to fail?” That’s the question I kept hearing during a brief but intense visit to Athens. My answer was that there is no “they” – that Greece does not, in fact, face a solid bloc of implacable creditors who would rather see default and exit from the euro than let a leftist government succeed, that there’s more good will on the other side of the table than many Greeks suppose.

But you can understand why Greeks see things that way. And I came away from the visit fearing that Greece and Europe may suffer a terrible accident, an unnecessary rupture that will cast long shadows over the future.

The story so far: At the end of 2009 Greece faced a crisis driven by two factors: High debt, and inflated costs and prices that left the country uncompetitive.

Dave Johnson: A Look at the Fast-Track Bill Shows It’s the Wrong Thing to Do

The “fast-track” trade-promotion-authority bill has been introduced in the Senate. Though Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution says, “The Congress shall have power to … regulate commerce with foreign nations,” under fast track Congress relinquishes that power and agrees to pass trade bills brought to them by the executive branch in a very short time frame with little debate and without making any changes should any problems present themselves.

Though it was announced that this year’s fast-track bill was the result of a “deal” between Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the 2015 bill is nearly identical to the 2014 bill that died in Congress without support for a vote. See this side-by-side comparison from Rep. Sander Levin (D-Michigan) of the House Ways and Means Committee. It is unclear from this comparison why the “negotiations” between Hatch and Wyden took so long, or what Wyden got that enabled him to put his name on it, enabling the bill to be sold as “bipartisan.”

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Can Republicans Learn From California?

Jim Brulte, California’s Republican chairman, has sobering but useful words for his party’s leaders and 2016 candidates: If they don’t learn from what happened to the GOP here, they may doom themselves to repeating its decidedly unpleasant experience.

“California is the leading edge of the country’s demographic changes,” Brulte said in an interview. “Frankly, Republicans in California did not react quickly enough to them, and we have paid a horrible price.”

One measure of the cost: In the three presidential elections of the 1980s, California voted twice for Ronald Reagan and once for George H. W. Bush. The state has not gone Republican since, and it won’t get any easier in 2016.

Bill Curry: My party fears a debate: This same nervous centrism created the Tea Party

Another Wall Street Democrat is running for president. Once again we must choose between acquiescence and rebellion

The race for president is on. And imagine this: The Democrats may not have any debates.

What awful timing for a runaway front-runner. The last time the Democrats were in such dire need of a debate was in 1968, when the Vietnam War drove Lyndon Johnson from office and drew the caliber of Bobby Kennedy, Gene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey into the fray. But if the party doesn’t want to have a real airing of issues, those who do have to figure out how to force one.

By ‘Democrats,’ I mean Hillary Clinton, with no others having joined the race. Clinton doesn’t want a real debate. Right now she’s trying not to repeat her 2008 campaign. She’d like to replicate Obama’s 2008 campaign. His secret sauce in both 2008 and 2012 was money, top-notch consultants, cutting-edge technology and a willingness to put ‘message’ before policy.

Despite the protections delineated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution (which in 1964 formally banned poll taxes), headlines remind us that the right to vote is “still threatened.” The US Supreme Court has mangled the Voting Rights Act, and the Congress has failed to repair the damage done. The Brennan Center for Justice has determined that at least 83 restrictive bills were introduced in 29 states where legislatures had floor activity in 2014, including proposals to require a photo ID, make voter registration more difficult, reduce early voting opportunities, and make it harder for students to vote.

“The stark and simple truth is this-the right to vote is threatened today-in a way that it has not been since the Voting Rights Act became law nearly five decades ago,” said President Obama.

The great American process of forming a more perfect union is far from complete. The events of 150 years ago were not the end of anything. They were a pivot point that took the United States in a better direction. But the was incomplete, and insufficient to establish justice. So the process continues.

That is why Congressmen Mark Pocan, D-Wisconsin, and Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota, have proposed to amend the Constitution to declare clearly and unequivocally that

Scott Paul: The Follies of Fast Track

Even before the ink was dry on the deal between committee leaders on fast-track trade-negotiating authority, Cabinet secretaries were already completely ignoring its milquetoast terms.

And that should tell you a lot about the direction this debate is headed.

There’s a passing reference to currency in the fast-track bill draft unveiled on Thursday, but there’s no requirement that it be deterred in any enforceable or meaningful way, inside or outside trade agreements such as the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

The TPP has already largely been negotiated, even though this current debate on trade-negotiating authority pretends to inform it. And it’s abundantly apparent from the comments of President Barack Obama, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, and Trade Ambassador Michael Froman that currency manipulation won’t be addressed in any enforceable way as part of the TPP.

For American workers, that’s bad news.

Mike Lux: Elizabeth Warren’s Comprehensive Wall Street Reform Agenda

Elizabeth Warren has given her fair share of great speeches, and has written some outstanding legislation on reforming Wall Street, but her speech on April 15 to the Hyman P. Minsky Conference was the best Wall Street policy speech I have ever heard her, or anyone, ever give. It was comprehensive without being a laundry list of in-the-weeds wonkiness. It laid out a strong philosophical rationale for why we need to do these reforms, and it was politically compelling as well. Her politically compelling argument laid out a strong philosophical rationale for why we need these reforms. Perhaps most importantly, she did all this while masterfully refuting the hackneyed attacks about her being anti-business, anti-growth, and anti-market forces.

Warren’s series of proposed reforms would be a major and much needed boost to an economy still held down by the Wall Street abuses that brought on the collapse of the massive housing bubble, the 2008 financial collapse, and the hardest hitting economic slowdown since the Great Depression.

Andrew Rosenthal: Ted Cruz’s Strange Gun Argument

Americans who believe the Second Amendment gives them an individual right to own guns (as opposed to a more general right to bear arms, as our editorial board argues) often make cogent arguments for their position. I believe that allowing people to own guns is not incompatible with imposing reasonable restrictions on their ownership, but I have heard sensible people strongly argue the opposite side.

But there are ridiculous arguments against gun control, perhaps the silliest of which is that the framers of the Constitution wanted to preserve the possibility, or even encourage the idea, of armed rebellion against the government. It’s a particularly absurd argument when it comes from a member of Congress who is running for president.

Hillary Clinton has backed NAFTA-style “free-trade” agreements and she has opposed NAFTA-style “free-trade” agreements. Like other prominent Democrats, she has been inconsistent in her support of what is best for workers, the environment and human rights.

But Clinton has a chance to get trade policy right when it matters.

And when it matters is now.

As she launches a 2016 presidential campaign in which she seems to be interested in grabbing the banner of economic populism-going so far as to complain in her announcement video about how “the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top”-Clinton can and should stake out a clear position in opposition to granting President Obama Trade Promotion Authority to negotiate a sweeping Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Jocelyn Sominson: Let citizens film the police! It’s the only way we learned what really happened to Walter Scott

Police-worn body cameras should be everywhere, but they’re no substitute for a civilian with a cellphone

We almost never saw the Walter Scott video. Feidin Santana, who recorded the April 4 shooting of Scott on his cellphone, nearly deleted the recording out of fear for his own safety. Santana had good reason to be scared – police officers across the United States have been known to retaliate against those who film them, using methods that range from blocking cameras and erasing recordings, to physical intimidation, violence and arrests for interference.  Such conduct by police officers is often in violation of established police procedures and constitutional rules regarding police conduct.  But it persists nonetheless.  In Washington, D.C, for example, an officer arrested someone for filming just one day after his police department issued a formal – and well-publicized – regulation regarding the filming of the police.

Although politicians across the country – from North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey to NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio – have reacted to the shooting of Walter Scott by calling for more police-worn body cameras, such calls for reform pass over the important issue of protecting civilian recording of the police.  Filming of the police by civilians serves a different purpose than police-worn cameras.  Cellphone footage, shot from the point of view of the civilian spectator, remains in control of the people rather than the police.  Videos can immediately become part of the public discussion, an antidote to the monopoly that police officers usually possess over official narratives surrounding police-citizen interactions.  Moreover, when filming is done by organized groups, often called [Copwatching http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa… recording of the police becomes a form of power-building that gives purpose and momentum to movements for change.

George Zornick: Now Congress Is Fast-Tracking the TPP Fast Track

After months of back-room negotiations, key congressional negotiators are finally ready to unveil legislation that would fast-track approval for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The bill would prohibit Congress from amending the trade deal, and would require a simple-majority vote for passage, but would in exchange set a variety of negotiating parameters.

If the architects of the legislation – Senators Ron Wyden and Orrin Hatch and Representative Paul Ryan – are at all worried that members of Congress will feel fast-track leaves them out of the process, they are doing a pretty terrible job of addressing those concerns.

A Senate Finance Committee hearing Thursday morning featured top US trade officials-but occurred before the legislation was even unveiled, and was called with almost no notice. This drew some unusual and strong rebukes from Democrats on the Finance Committee over an unfair process.

Michael Eric Dyson: Racial Terror, Fast and Slow

IN the past two years, this country has held events commemorating 50 years since the triumphs and key struggles of the civil rights movement: the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act and, most recently, the “Bloody Sunday” march in Selma, Ala.

Yet the glory of the past runs up against the gory details of the present.

The killing this month of Walter L. Scott by Officer Michael T. Slager highlights two interlocking truths: Social protest forces us to see realities we would rather avoid, and blacks live in mortal fear for our lives in a manner that most whites don’t see or understand.

Americans are bad at viewing race in real time; we prefer rose-tinted lenses and slow-motion replays in which we can control the narrative and minimize our complicity in the horrors of our history. The racial present is messy, and upends bland racial optimism about how far we’ve come.

On April 15, perhaps as you’re reading these words, working people in 200 American cities will rally for a $15 dollar base wage and the right to form a union. Solidarity demonstrations are planned in more than 30 cities on six continents, and have already taken place in Switzerland, the Philippines, South Korea, New Zealand, and Japan. The “fight for $15” matters — because the lives of working people matter, and because the success of this effort will help strengthen the American economy for everyone.

But the significance of April 15’s action runs even deeper than that. [..]

As our world continues to change, we will continue to face new challenges. We will need new movements, new alliances, and new ideas. But behind them will remain an idea as old as the labor movement itself: that all working people have the right to a decent life. That means a living wage, and time to live your life. It means knowing you’ll be financially secure decades from now, and knowing that your work hours have been scheduled for the next week so that you can arrange for child care.

Labor movements are a symbol of our values and an expression of our renewed hope. The Fight for $15 is a fine cause on its own merits. But its greatest importance may lie in the fact that it represents the return of the “vanishing worker” — which in the end means the return of our friends, our families, and our neighbors — to the American political stage.

Mary Bottari: Hotel Industry Spins Wage Hikes as ‘Extreme’ While CEOs Rake in Millions

Hotels are making a killing. Occupancy rates are exceeding pre-recession highs, and are expected to reach record levels in 2016.  Profits per room are up over 11 percent this April compared to April 2014 and the average daily rate for a room is almost 13 percent higher than it was a year ago. Executive salaries have skyrocketed.

But the little-known trade association representing this robust $163 billion dollar industry is a major force fighting behind the scenes on Capitol Hill and in statehouses and courtrooms across the country to keep workers wages low.

On Wednesday, April 15, the same day that hundreds of thousands of working people in over 200 cities are expected to participate in the largest-ever mobilization of underpaid workers, the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA) which represents the 1.8 million-employee U.S. lodging industry will join forces with the National Restaurant Association to ask Congress to block a federal minimum wage increase, shrink the number of workers eligible for employer-provided health care insurance, and challenge the National Labor Relations Board ruling protecting the rights of franchise workers.

Frank Clemente: Repeal of Estate Tax Rewards Billionaires, Punishes Working Americans

Who deserves a break more these days: a struggling working family, or the heir to a billion-dollar fortune? According to the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, it’s the billion-dollar baby.

Recently, the House voted for a budget that would end tax credits for many working families that put $1,000 a year in their pockets, on average. The Republican budget also would cut $5 trillion in funding for benefits and services that make groceries, health care and college more affordable, pay for road improvements, and invest in scientific research.

Adding insult to injury, House conservatives plan to eliminate the estate tax, which is paid only by multi-millionaires and billionaires. An estate has to be worth at least $5.4 million before a dime in taxes gets paid. If the estate is passed on by a couple, it has to be worth nearly $11 million.

Repeal would hand elite households a $3 million tax break, according to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT).

Simon Jenkins: Cuba has shown us that sanctions don’t work – so why keep using them?

Sanctions have become as sacred to western armouries as nuclear bombs were 50 years ago. No one dares question them for fear of being thought a dove or a wimp. They cost little to the aggressor but make them feel good. They repress trade rivals. They attract macho adjectives, such as tough, meaningful, targeted and smart. They are chiefly aimed at domestic consumption. Only the poor (and a handful of rich) in the victim states suffer.

Influencing policy in foreign countries short of war is a mug’s game. It is realistic only where it takes the form of diplomatic, trade and cultural exchange, and strengthens the professional and merchant class from which brave criticism of authoritarian government tends to emerge. Yet sanctions suppress such groups and drive them into exile, as now in Russia and Iran.

The idea that economic warfare would ever cause Iraqis to rise up against Saddam, or Libyans against Gaddafi, or Cubans against Castro, was always daft. The idea that it will turn Russia against Putin is beyond absurd. Yet such warfare remains British government policy. And in Labour’s manifesto, sanctions are no more questioned than nuclear weapons. Stupid still rules.

In the coming weeks, Congress must decide whether to renew the Patriot Act, which the National Security Agency (NSA) uses to collect Americans’ telephone records in bulk, regardless of whether they are suspected of any criminal or terrorist activity. These records can tell the government a lot about our private lives – whether we called a psychiatrist or a gun dealer, for example – and the debate likely will focus on how to protect Americans’ right to privacy against unwarranted intrusions. But there is another important issue at stake in the run up to the Patriot Act’s sunset: the role of the foreign intelligence surveillance court that supervises NSA programs.

Like the president and Congress, courts have limits on their authority. Under the Constitution, our courts don’t give advice – they decide concrete disputes. In practical terms, that generally means there must be at least two parties present in court, and they must disagree over the lawfulness of particular actions that one or more of them has taken.

Anna Lappé: The long, dirty trail of fake science

Revealing Big Oil’s role in climate change denialism

“Doubt is our product,” (pdf) wrote executives for tobacco giant Brown & Williamson in a now infamous 1969 memo on industry communications strategy. The memo was revealed during discovery in class-action lawsuits against tobacco companies that would eventually yield a trove of 85 million pages. Among those pages are details about the public relations playbook of an industry that – as far back as 1958 – knew that smoking caused cancer and used public relations to fight regulation for decades.

“Merchants of Doubt,” a brilliant new film from documentarian Robert Kenner (of “Food Inc.” fame), reveals this spin and tracks how other industries, from chemical manufacturers to pharmaceuticals, are ripping pages from Big Tobacco’s playbook to fight their own regulation and public scrutiny.

Based on the book of the same name by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, the film reveals, in particular, Big Oil’s role in climate change denialism. It makes the argument that the world’s biggest energy companies funded PR and lobbying firms that fomented doubt about climate science and thereby stalled action on climate policy. The film pulls back the curtain on the backstage battle to win the hearts and minds of the American public, with nothing short of a stable climate in the balance.

Michelle Chen: Can Labor Bring Wall Street Back to Main Street?

The 2007 banking collapse exposed the abysmal gap between the titans of finance and the 99 percent. But long ago, there was one place where Wall Street and Main Street intersected: at the teller window of your local retail bank. Some community activists want to pull Wall Street back toward an era when banking was done by real people, and retail banks invested in the neighborhood instead of pushing consumers into foreclosure. Can we bring back your friendly bank teller?

Seven years since Wall Street imploded, it seems the banking sector has rebounded far faster than the communities it has devastated, according to a report published by Center for Popular Democracy (pdf) (CPD), which builds on a global campaign to advocate for fair labor and corporate accountability in Big Banks.

The report finds that poor communities tend to be both underbanked and overexploited by banks. Though lenders no longer give away subprime mortgages like candy, bank chains still degrade vulnerable consumers. Roughly a quarter of households nationwide are considered unbanked or underbanked, lacking access to basic financial resources like a checking account. Big Banks instead market relatively high-risk financial products to the poor, while ignoring the essential economic vehicles that help build assets prudently and realistically. Despite their relatively paltry wealth, among the hardest hit by the financial collapse were low-income communities of color. “The median net worth for people of color fell 53 percent during the Great Recession [but] for whites fell only 16 percent,” CPD reports. But today the leading Big Banks have ironically “emerged stronger and more consolidated, rather than being fundamentally restructured.”

Jessica Valenti: Dealing with trolls will make young women sympathetic to Hillary Clinton

When I visit college campuses, young women always ask me how I deal with negativity online – and how they can. How can I write and participate on social media when it inevitably results in ad hominem attacks and vitriol? The students I speak to increasingly feel like they have to consider, before choosing a career path or posting an opinion in a public forum, whether they can cope with violently sexist responses and a never-ending barrage of misogynistic bullshit.

If anyone knows the answer to their questions, it’s Hillary Clinton. Her career has long epitomized how misogyny can haunts female politicians: the Hillary “nutcracker”, the pokes about her headbands, her hair, her pantsuits, her voice. She has too often been the target of insults based on men’s fear about powerful women – an unenviable position that few can understand. [..]

Clearly there is more to winning over young female voters than commiserating over sexist awfulness and advice on overcoming misogyny. But I’m betting there’s a deep-seated desire in a lot of young women to see sexist tormentors get theirs. Maybe they can’t stop the guy who tweets fat jokes at them, and maybe they’re too embarrassed to report the anonymous sexual threats in their Facebook messages. But what they can do is give a big “fuck you” to every get-back-in-the-kitchen YouTube bottom-dweller or cable news host jerk who mocks Clinton’s appearance by making their distaste known at the voting booth.

Then we’ll see who is making the sammiches. I’ll take an Italian sub.

Ashley Diamond, a transgender inmate who was denied medically necessary hormones by the Georgia correctional system, was raped seven times, called a “he-she thing”, and thrown into solitary confinement for “pretending” to be a woman.

Last week, the United States Justice Department weighed in on her lawsuit and found that Georgia’s “freeze-frame” policy – which denied trans inmates the chance to begin or expand hormone treatment in prison – constituted “cruel and unusual punishment” and violated the United States Constitution.

This horrific treatment illustrates the broader policy changes we desperately need to ensure that no one in a correction setting – or any setting, for that matter – is denied their human or civil rights because of their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Today, transgender women in male prisons are 13 times more likely than the general prison population to be sexually assaulted while incarcerated. Nearly two-thirds of trans inmates report sexual assault. And more often than not, assaults go unreported in part because the perpetrators are prison guards, wardens and staff.

This is a disgrace.

Steven W. Thrasher: The inhumanity of ‘Fuck your breath’ should stop all of us cold

It’s hard for black Americans to catch our breath these days: from Michael Brown to Eric Garner to John Crawford to Tamir Rice to Walter Scott and now Eric Harris, we just keep getting the wind knocked out of us as we bear witness to death after unnecessary death of black men at the hands of the police.

Those who police us, however, can breathe quite easily. [..]

This weekend, Black Lives Matter activist Cherrell Brown asked audience members of a conference on policing that I attended to close our eyes and imagine a place where we felt safe. No one imagined a place with cops, cameras, guns, or attack dogs. And yet, as Brown noted, we’re asked to believe that, to feel safe, we need more cops in New York City, more racially diverse cops, more cops wearing cameras – more law enforcement, not more safety.

More cops, more guns and more cameras might make many white people feel more safe, but just the thought makes it hard for black people to breathe, because we know that they’ll all be trained on us. Fuck your false sense of security; I just want to be able to catch my breath.

Robert Reich: Will Hillary Rodham Clinton Deliver on Her Promise to Be a ‘Champion’ for ‘Everyday Americans’?

It’s a paradox.

Almost all the economic gains are still going to the top, leaving America’s vast middle class with stagnant wages and little or no job security. Two-thirds of Americans are working paycheck to paycheck.

Meanwhile, big money is taking over our democracy.

If there were ever a time for a bold Democratic voice on behalf of hardworking Americans, it is now.

Yet I don’t recall a time when the Democratic Party’s most prominent office holders sounded as meek. With the exception of Elizabeth Warren, they’re pussycats. If Paul Wellstone, Teddy Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, or Ann Richards were still with us, they’d be hollering.

The fire now is on the right, stoked by the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, and a pocketful of hedge-fund billionaires.

Today’s Republican firebrands, beginning with Ted Cruz, blame the poor, blacks, Latinos, and immigrants for what’s been happening. They avoid any mention of wealth and power.

Which brings me to Hillary Rodham Clinton.