Tag: Opinion

The Internet is the most democratic communication platform in history, largely because we’ve had network neutrality rules that make sure all web traffic is treated equally, and no voices are discriminated against. Because of network neutrality rules, activists can turn to the Internet to bypass the discrimination of mainstream cable, broadcast and print outlets as we organize for change. It is because of net neutrality rules that the Internet is the only communication channel left where Black voices can speak and be heard, produce and consume, on our own terms.

But, right now, Black online voices are threatened. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is drafting and preparing to vote on new rules that will either preserve the level online playing field we’ve enjoyed for the last several decades, or destroy it.  

The FCC can take a clear path to prevent discrimination online. The agency can reclassify broadband as a common carrier service under Title II of the Communications Act. Reclassifying the Internet with strong, bright line net neutrality rules can guarantee every Internet user’s right to connect with any person or website, on any device or cell phone, without discrimination, censorship or other interference.  

Jeb Lund: If you’re a politician and your chummy past with neo-Nazis resurfaces, don’t worry. Ask Ron Paul

I’m not a fan of hot takes, but this time I’m putting my foot down. Nazis are bad.

But apparently some kids missed the public service announcements about it. Louisiana Representative Steve Scalise, the House GOP Whip and third-highest ranking member of the House GOP leadership tried to “groove” on Nazism in 2002, appearing at a convention of the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), which was founded by Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard and neo-Nazi David Duke.

Thankfully, now that his appearance has been unearthed, the Scalise spin machine is on it: “Throughout his career in public service, Mr Scalise has spoken to hundreds of different groups with a broad range of viewpoints,” said Scalise spokesperson Moira Bagley. Ahh, yes, and there’s the expected out – he was there, but he only exhaled.

She went on: “In every case, he was building support for his policies, not the other way around.”[..]

After all, it’s probably not hard to turn a neo-Nazi into a potential Republican voter by telling him that a corporatized, authoritarian, nationalistic, militaristic party is the only thing standing between him and effete, war-losing, left-wing elites who are trying to destroy the homeland via a fifth-column of non-native minorities, college professors, “homosexuals” and other cultural degenerates.

Hell, I’m not even mad about Scalise. I’m just disappointed.

Reditt Hudson: Police officers who violate citizens’ rights must be punished. Accountability is the only way forward

There is one criminal justice system for citizens – especially black and brown ones – and another for police in the United State.

As a former cop, when I watch the video of Eric Garner being choked out, of him having his face smashed into the concrete as he told the officers that were on top of him he couldn’t breathe, there is no mistaking the truth: the only person whose life was at risk during that encounter was Eric Garner’s.

I’ve been shot at while enforcing the law in my state, and I have friends that remain with the department I worked for that have risked their lives as well; we all have tremendous respect for the job. But we all know – either from personal experience or the experience of someone close to us – that there are officers that will violate citizens’ human rights and civil liberties with impunity and who are comfortable in the knowledge that the system will protect and cover for their actions. And while the race of the officer abusing his or her authority may vary, the race of those whose rights and bodies are abused almost never does.

These inequities have led, inexorably, to the current national crisis in police-community relations – and the best way forward is to make sure we severely punish officers that violate the rights of the citizens they serve. They must be held accountable for their actions. There is one criminal justice system for citizens – especially black and brown ones – and another for police in the United State.

As a former cop, when I watch the video of Eric Garner being choked out, of him having his face smashed into the concrete as he told the officers that were on top of him he couldn’t breathe, there is no mistaking the truth: the only person whose life was at risk during that encounter was Eric Garner’s.

I’ve been shot at while enforcing the law in my state, and I have friends that remain with the department I worked for that have risked their lives as well; we all have tremendous respect for the job. But we all know – either from personal experience or the experience of someone close to us – that there are officers that will violate citizens’ human rights and civil liberties with impunity and who are comfortable in the knowledge that the system will protect and cover for their actions. And while the race of the officer abusing his or her authority may vary, the race of those whose rights and bodies are abused almost never does.

These inequities have led, inexorably, to the current national crisis in police-community relations – and the best way forward is to make sure we severely punish officers that violate the rights of the citizens they serve. They must be held accountable for their actions. There is one criminal justice system for citizens – especially black and brown ones – and another for police in the United State.

As a former cop, when I watch the video of Eric Garner being choked out, of him having his face smashed into the concrete as he told the officers that were on top of him he couldn’t breathe, there is no mistaking the truth: the only person whose life was at risk during that encounter was Eric Garner’s.

I’ve been shot at while enforcing the law in my state, and I have friends that remain with the department I worked for that have risked their lives as well; we all have tremendous respect for the job. But we all know – either from personal experience or the experience of someone close to us – that there are officers that will violate citizens’ human rights and civil liberties with impunity and who are comfortable in the knowledge that the system will protect and cover for their actions. And while the race of the officer abusing his or her authority may vary, the race of those whose rights and bodies are abused almost never does.

These inequities have led, inexorably, to the current national crisis in police-community relations – and the best way forward is to make sure we severely punish officers that violate the rights of the citizens they serve. They must be held accountable for their actions.

I grew up in New York in the 1960s and 70s saying a prayer whenever I heard a siren – a prayer for whomever the siren wailed, and a prayer for the men behind the siren, the policemen and firemen risking their lives every day, my uncles (and later cousins) among them. That’s what my mother taught me. I still find myself doing it sometimes. [..]

Now I live in New York again, for the first time since the 1970s, and again New York is in turmoil over the police –  not just over the killings of Garner and other unarmed black men, but over the murders of two police officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, in Brooklyn on Dec. 20.  White New Yorkers fear a return to the bad old days of riots, escalating crime and attacks on police. In the 1970s, 46 officers were killed in the line of duty, according to the New York Times, and 41 more in the 1980s. Before these latest murders, the last police killing was in 2011.

Black New Yorkers say the bad old days – of police abuse – never ended. The loudest voices are on the extremes, shouting down those who are trying to find common ground.

David Dayen: 2015′s biggest days for politics: Salon’s handy calendar for the next year

Want to know which critical deadlines Republicans will sneakily try to exploit? Bookmark this timeline as a guide

The conventional wisdom is that the 114th Congress will feature mostly angry white men in suits yelling about something or other, without the normal output from a legislative branch, like “legislation.” The passage of the CRomnibus should put that theory to rest. Republicans were able to slide dozens of policy riders into a must-pass bill, with Democrats and the White House agreeing to the changes amid the risk of a government shutdown. GOP legislators are salivating at the prospect of running this movie over and over again in the final two years of the Obama presidency.

Fortunately for the Republicans, they will have quite a few opportunities to test this model, in their first year of total congressional control since 2006. The 2015 calendar is littered with a series of critical deadlines, which Republicans will surely try to exploit. You can pretty much throw out the rest of the year and just tune in to Congress around these deadline dates, most likely the only times when anything of import will actually happen. Here’s your congressional calendar for the next year:

What’s not to like about the economic record of this president?

By a host of measures, the U.S. economy has done exceptionally well under President Barack Obama. So why does he receive such poor approval ratings, especially from the most prosperous and economically conservative Americans? [..]

So what’s not to like about the economic record of this president?

What most people know is that they are working hard and getting nowhere and that even if they perform well, their jobs can evaporate in an instant.

Median household income was $59,139 last year, about $4,500 below 2007 but up all of $189 from 2012. As I showed in a previous column, the median wage last year was at its lowest level since 1998, and the average wage remains below its 2007 peak.

Therein lies a key to understanding dissatisfaction with Obama’s economic policies.  While about 10 million jobs have been added since the low point a year into his first term, wages have stagnated. [..]

Had congressional Republicans cooperated with the president, our economy would be larger by 3 percent, or about $529 billion, the St. Louis Federal Reserve and other researchers estimate. Unrealized economic output is a terrible waste, especially when it results from petty political animus.

Now that the economy is expanding at the fastest rate we’ve seen in more than a decade, public perception about Obama’s economic policies is beginning to improve. But whatever Americans ultimately conclude about Obama, they should view his economic policies in a light that balances his broad successes and failures with the declared determination of Republican congressional leaders to oppose Obama’s policies at all costs.

David Dayen: The Super Bowl doesn’t need terrorism insurance. Here’s why

In its final week, the 113th US Congress managed to pass a spending bill loaded with policy giveaways to special interests, and a year-long extension of mostly corporate tax breaks.

But they couldn’t finish off the lobbyist Triple Crown. There was one task Congress couldn’t tackle: approve an extension of the Terrorist Risk Insurance Act, known as TRIA. The bill provides lucrative government bailout protection for the insurance industry in case of a terrorist attack like 9/11 or, as Hollywood has feared, retribution for American entertainment choices by North Korea. [..]

But perhaps the expiration of TRIA can shed some light on its necessity.

Supporters claim new real estate development will collapse without affordable terrorism coverage; let’s see if that’s the case. They argue that the economy will suffer; we can certainly find out. They claim that no other solution but a government guarantee exists; we can test that theory.

In fact, we already have some evidence that the industry caterwauling is overblown: the NFL has said they will not need to cancel the Super Bowl in the wake of the failure to pass TRIA, despite news reports to that effect.

Congress rarely gets the chance to run a natural experiment on whether the policies they enact make sense in the real world. The bungling of TRIA provides that opportunity. It’s up to them whether or not they seize it.

John Nichols: Bill de Blasio Is Not the First New York City Mayor to Clash With Police Unions

The leaflet was meant to highlight anger on the part of police officers with the mayor of New York. It encouraged officers to fill their names in on a document that read, “I, . . ., a New York City police officer, want all of my family and brother officers who read this to know [that] in the event of my death [the mayor and his police commissioner should] be denied attendance of any memorial service in my honor as their attendance would only bring disgrace to my memory.”

That’s how deep the divisions ran.

Yes, “ran.”

The leaflet mentioned above was distributed in 1997. The mayor in question was Rudolph Giuliani, and The New York Times reported on rank-and-file members of the powerful Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association urging fellow officers to sign the documents. Though the union did not officially sanction the jab at the mayor, its circulation among officers “demonstrates the depths of their discontent,” reported the Times in an article on a contract dispute in which Giuliani was taking a hard line against pay increases. [..]

In his eulogy for Officer Ramos, Mayor de Blasio preached a gospel of reconciliation that sought to reduce the current animosity, describing how police officers “help make a place that otherwise would be torn with strife a place of peace.” The mayoral olive branch was not accepted Saturday, just as previous efforts by previous mayors to ease tensions with the PBA have hit rough spots. This is a part of the story of big-city policing and politics. But it is not the whole story. The whole story tells us that it is possible for a strong mayor to get through hard times that include clashes with a strong police union, to propose and implement reforms that the mayor, many police officers and most citizens know to be necessary, and to survive politically. This is the historical reality, as opposed to the media-frenzy spin of the moment. And it is this reality that Mayor de Blasio would do well to keep in mind through the weeks and months to come.

Eugene Robinson: Economic Facts Get in the Way of Presidential Ambitions

Uh-oh. Now that the economy is doing well, what are Republicans-especially those running for president-going to complain about? And what are Democrats willing to celebrate?

Last week’s announcement that the economy grew at a 5 percent rate in the third quarter of 2014-following 4.6 percent second-quarter growth-was the clearest and least debatable indication to date that sustained recovery is no longer a promise, it’s a fact. [..]

GOP candidates face a dilemma. To win in the primaries, where the influence of the far-right activist base is magnified, it may be necessary to continue the give-no-quarter attacks on Obama’s record, regardless of what the facts might say. But in the general election, against a capable Democratic candidate-someone like Hillary Clinton, if she decides to run-pretending that up is down won’t cut it. [..]

Likewise, Elizabeth Warren charges that the administration’s coziness with Wall Street helps ensure that the deck remains stacked against the middle class. Warren says she isn’t running for president but wants to influence the debate. She has. Clinton’s speeches have begun sounding more populist, in spite of her long-standing Wall Street ties.

You know the old saying about how there’s no arguing with success? Our politicians are about to prove it wrong.

When a peaceful protest tips into violence, the state’s case for the legitimacy of its use of suppressive force is validated, instantly. This is counterproductive, obviously, when the reason for protesting in the first place is to end what we see as wrongful use of state force. This is also a large part of why I am a pacifist: for pragmatic reasons. I subscribe to the belief that non-violent means are more effective than violent ones. I cannot assure you that I would subscribe to this same belief if I was black. I do not know that I would.

I have taken part in – and plan to continue to take part in, and encourage others to take part in – the current protests against racist policing in America, but I know and encourage others to remember this: Black people are on the front lines. It is first and foremost a black movement. Black people are risking far more by being out there face-to-face with cops than white people. (Recent history proves this all too convincingly.) White people’s role in protest should be a secondary one – a strictly supportive role, not agitating or bottle-throwing so much as chanting along, marching in time, bearing witness, simply being there to be counted.

Robert Reich: The Republican’s Magical Mystery Tour (Coming Soon)

According to reports, one of the first acts of the Republican congress will be to fire Doug Elmendorf, current director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, because he won’t use “dynamic scoring” for his economic projections.

Dynamic scoring is the magical-mystery math Republicans have been pushing since they came up with supply-side “trickle-down” economics.

It’s based on the belief that cutting taxes unleashes economic growth and thereby produces additional government revenue. Supposedly the added revenue more than makes up for what’s lost when Congress hands out the tax cuts.

Dynamic scoring would make it easier to enact tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, because the tax cuts wouldn’t look as if they increased the budget deficit.

Incoming House Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) calls it “reality-based scoring,” but it’s actually magical scoring – which is why Elmendorf, as well as all previous CBO directors have rejected it.

Few economic theories have been as thoroughly tested in the real world as supply-side economics, and so notoriously failed.

Mike Gravel: The law will protect any member of Congress who releases the full torture report. Someone needs to step up

I took a risk so that Americans knew what our government did in Vietnam. Today’s elected representatives should do the same for Iraq and Afghanistan

It should be easy to get the entire report on the record: any information held by the Congress is technically already in the record, so no one need read it in its entirety on the floor of either congressional chamber or enter it in the committee or subcommittee record, the way I had to with the Pentagon Papers. A member of Congress may hand out the information to the press or the public, so long as the distribution occurs on property associated with the Senate or House of Representatives: the constitution does not qualify how “Speech and Debate ” is exercised, only that it occur “in either House”.

But why is it necessary? The torture report released to the public was incomplete – and only a full release of the Torture Report and the million or more documents in CIA possession but which the Intelligence Committee still has access can lay bare the full horrors of what the government perpetrated in our names.

Bruce Fischer: In Black Lives Matter Protest, Corporate Rights Trump Free Speech

Minnesotans protesting police violence and institutional racism could face “staggering” fees and criminal charges for a protest at Mall of America, with the City of Bloomington announcing plans to force organizers to pay for the mall’s lost revenue during the exercise of their free speech rights, highlighting important questions about free speech in an era of privatized public spaces. [..]

Can the Mall of America prohibit the exercise of free speech and assembly on its premises? And can it pick-and-choose who it allows to assemble? Last year, for example, the Mall allowed around 7,000 people to gather in the same rotunda to honor a young white man who died of cancer.

The First Amendment protects against government suppression of speech, but not private responses to the exercise of free speech and expression. And the Mall of America is considered private property, despite receiving hundreds of millions in public subsidies since it was built, including an additional $250 million approved last year.

For decades, courts have struggled with how to protect free speech in public forums that have grown increasingly privatized.

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These are Dickensian times, when charity is rationed by politicians and pundits callously dismiss the poor as a burden best forced by hunger to grab at bootstraps and pull themselves upward.

Charles Dickens wrote of such times in 1843.

But surely he would have recognized 2014, a year that began with the Congress of the wealthiest nation in the world locked in debate over cutting funds for nutrition programs that serve those who are in need. The cuts were approved and, as the year progressed, so there came the announcements that tens of thousands of Americans would no longer have access to food stamps.

Food stamp cuts in a land of plenty are just one measure of the cruelty of the moment. There are also the threats to cut benefits for the long-term unemployed and to restrict access to welfare programs, which come even as Congress delivers another holiday-season “wish list” to the banking behemoths that have figured out how to crash economies and still profit.

Amy Goodman: Mark Udall Can Make History by Releasing the Torture Report

Mark Udall, the outgoing Democratic senator from Colorado, may be a lame duck, leaving office in less than a week. But his most important work in the Senate may still be before him. For the week he remains in office, he still sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He worked on that committee’s epic, 6,700-page, still-secret report, the “Committee Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” otherwise known as the torture report. The intelligence committee has recently released a heavily redacted declassified executive summary of the report, in which new, gory details of the torture conducted during the Bush/Cheney administration have been made public for the first time.

Udall is angry about the U.S. torture program. He is angry about the heavy redaction of the executive summary, and the CIA and White House interference in the intelligence committee’s oversight work. He wants the full report made available to the public. While it is still secret, Udall could release the classified document in its entirety. To understand how, it helps to go back to 1971, the release of the Pentagon Papers and a senator from Alaska named Mike Gravel.

Syreeta McFadden: We declared in 2014 that black lives matter because we saw how often they didn’t

The great divide between black and white America will continue to insist upon itself. Racialized income inequality, the lingering effects of housing discrimination and persistent school segregation fuel the separation of communities, or at least prevent us from mixing, meeting and socializing interracially which, in turn, fuels indifference and the false narrative of a colorblind society.

Were we truly so naive to believe that post-racial America was a real thing?

We are past the point where any of us should be satisfied with flat conversations around racisms – structural or interpersonal. We are past the point that we can deflect. It’s time that we ask harder questions of ourselves and entertain – even demand – difficult answers. We shouldn’t have to have another march from Ferguson to Jefferson City to assert the personhood of black Americans in 21st century America. We can’t be afraid to talk honestly about the brutal legacy of slavery or its phantom effects that pervade every aspect of our society. We can’t be afraid to acknowledge racism for fear of being labeled racist.

We can’t rely on the reality of the Obama presidency to substitute for the deep, authentic work of interrogating who we really are, and the depths of our racial fears and biases. We cannot have to march in the streets for another year, and another, to remind America that black lives matter.

Nicholas Phillips: Missouri showed off America’s worst in 2014. Are we really this damn divided?

Missouri lore has it that in 1899, the state’s congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver averred in a speech, “Frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.”

That’s the homespun skepticism that earned Missouri its unofficial nickname – the stuff of license plates: the Show-Me State. Folks here in the middle of America pride ourselves on a preference for facts over foolishness, deeds over declarations. But what Missourians lack is a robust self-skepticism – the ability to admit that we are wrong, or plain don’t know. And in the tumult of the past year – whether from faith- and fear-based state laws that even our most backward southern neighbors won’t enact, or the unrest and police violence in the streets of Ferguson – that character flaw was laid bare. In 2014, Missouri showed itself, and the nation, at its most benighted. [..]

More than 120 years ago, Missouri’s greatest writer and sage, Mark Twain, wrote, “Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world – and never will.”

If Missouri or any other American state with similar conflicts – racial, religious, political, whatever – have any hope of healing, it lies with those who are serious and sturdy enough to ditch their petrified opinions, to embrace complexity and to absorb facts that make them uneasy. The power-elite must do it. The strong young leaders of the Ferguson protests must keep pushing them to do it, and keep doing it themselves. We’ll all be served by a healthy self-skepticism.

Sonali Kolhatkar: The Sony Hack Revealed How Hollywood Fails Us All

Whether or not North Korea was really behind the devastating Sony hack, and whether or not the U.S. government orchestrated North Korea’s Internet outage in retaliation, one thing is clear: The incident has exposed Hollywood’s serious race problem yet again. People of color are barely visible on our screens, while women’s roles are generally foils for men. When minorities and women are present, the film industry usually relies on racist and sexist tropes.

I have not seen “The Interview”-Sony Pictures Entertainment’s targeted film about a foolhardy assassination attempt on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that supposedly irked the Guardians of Peace hacker group so much, it motivated the members to devastate Sony’s servers. But even simply watching the trailer reveals that the film’s premise is perfectly in line with standard Hollywood fare that serves up comedies through the eyes of self-effacing white men whose harebrained schemes and screwball antics are expected to make audiences wish they were dumb enough to be so hip.

Pop culture defines how we as a society view ourself. It also reflects and informs our implicit biases against one another. And it has remained far behind the times. As the hue of our society continues to diversify, our TV and movie screens remain largely the domain of straight, white men.

The Interview may be released after all, but just because a Hollywood studio got hacked doesn’t mean it can censor Twitter, the news media and sites across the web

After a pre-Christmas week full of massive backlash for caving to a vague and unsubstantiated threat by hackers supposedly from North Korea, Sony has reversed course and decided it will allow The Interview to be shown after all – thus all but ending what Senator John McCain absurdly called “the greatest blow to free speech that I’ve seen in my lifetime probably”.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s unequivocally good news that North Korea (or whoever hacked Sony) won’t succeed in invoking a ludicrous heckler’s veto over a satirical movie starring Seth Rogen, but there are far greater threats to our freedom of speech here in the United States. For example, Sony itself.

Lost in the will-they-or-won’t-they controversy over Sony’s potential release of The Interview has been the outright viciousness that Sony has unleashed on some of the biggest social-media sites and news outlets in the world. For the past two weeks, the studio has been trying to bully these publishing platforms into stopping the release of newsworthy stories or outright censoring already-public information contained in the hacked emails, despite a clear First Amendment right to the contrary.

Robert Reich: The Government Problem

Some believe the central political issue of our era is the size of the government. They’re wrong. The central issue is whom the government is for.

Consider the new spending bill Congress and the President agreed to a few weeks ago.

It’s not especially large by historic standards. Under the $1.1 trillion measure, government spending doesn’t rise as a percent of the total economy. In fact, if the economy grows as expected, government spending will actually shrink over the next year.

The problem with the legislation is who gets the goodies and who’s stuck with the tab.

For example, it repeals part of the Dodd-Frank Act designed to stop Wall Street from using other peoples’ money to support its gambling addiction, as the Street did before the near-meltdown of 2008.

Tim Arnold: America Has Lost Its Soul

We Americans wave our nation’s flag and crow our national anthem, self-assured, full of pride, assuming our jingoistic clattering will continue to fool the world that we are an honorable nation. Instead, we are exposing ourselves as pretenders to the democratic values our forefathers defined for us.

“America, who are we?” asks Charles Blow in his NY Times op-ed piece: “Are we – or better yet – should we be – a nation that tortures detainees, or targets and kills American citizens with drones, or has broad discretion to spy on the American public.” [..]

Dick Cheney is a metaphor for everything that’s wrong with America today. But he’s not alone, not by far.

Are we the nation who’s “have’s” have established the widest financial gap with the “have not’s” in our country’s recent history, with no end in sight – once again enabled by our congress to make it even wider? The upper 1% now holds more dollars than the lower 42%! Is this really us?

Mike Lux: A Progressive Populism That Works

There is a lot of talk in Democratic party circles about populism (which among Democrats is generally of a more progressive nature) vs centrism. All three terms — progressive, populism, and centrism — are thrown around way too loosely by pundits who rarely know what they are talking about. For some, it all boils down to the differences (stylistically as well as substantively) between Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren. For others, it is a debate about whether Democrats should talk about growth or inequality — a recent report from Benenson Strategy Group and SKDKnickerbocker ominously warned that swing voters want the focus to be on growth rather than inequality. Some pundits talk about whether Democrats should be pro-business or more for income distribution.

Even though I happily identify myself as a proud populist progressive, I think these kinds of pundit-driven definitions don’t do much to build a winning message or agenda for either Democrats or the progressive movement. I think we need a populism that doesn’t just repeat old formulas but answers voters’ real concerns about progressive policies. Here’s what I think a winning populist progressive program entails:

Holiday shoppers can help ensure their gifts are produced under fair conditions

Yuletide lore tells us that the clothing and toys that appear under the Christmas tree are made by cheerful elves in Santa’s workshop. While they are likely to be made far away, of course we know that the gifts don’t come from the North Pole.

Wherever they are stationed, Santa’s real-life helpers deserve safe and fair working conditions. And Christmas shoppers have an opportunity to help.

Over the last two years, anti-sweatshop campaigners have focused on the plight of garment workers in Bangladesh and Cambodia. In the wake of the horrific collapse of Rana Plaza in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2012, which killed 1,100 employees of several garment factories, labor advocates have been pushing for safeguards that would avoid similar tragedies. Similarly, after a series of national strikes by garment workers in Cambodia, European manufacturers have pledged to raise wages. Activists are now calling on U.S. brands to do the same.

In the past two decades, labor rights advocates have helped enact reforms to curtail child labor and improve working conditions in the garment industry. However, there is still a long way to go.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Change in Cuba policy is a nod to reality

President Obama’s decision to normalize relations with Cuba is a decision to recognize reality. For 50 years, the United States has pursued a policy that has failed. The embargo hurt the Cuban people it claimed to help and bolstered the regime that it intended to undermine. The effort to isolate Cuba has been increasingly isolating the United States both in the hemisphere and across the world. And as the president concluded, “I do not believe we can keep doing the same thing for over five decades and expect a different result.” To believe that would be, as Albert Einstein taught us, the very definition of insanity.

The best evidence that this change was long overdue was provided by the hysterical and incoherent reactions of its opponents. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a potential presidential contender, embraced the initiative, making an indisputable comment about the embargo: “If the goal is regime change, it sure doesn’t seem to be working.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) replied that Paul “has no idea what he’s talking about.” [..]

In April, Obama will attend the Summit of the Americas in Panama along with other presidents, including Cuba’s Raúl Castro. There, we might listen more and bluster less. The end of the embargo – if it is lifted – may mark the beginning of a new good-neighbor policy, not just toward Cuba but toward other countries in the hemisphere. We would all profit from that.

Michelle Chen: Is Your Favorite Chocolate the Product of Child Labor?

A good chunk of that deliciousness on our holiday dessert trays is sourced from lush farmlands of West Africa, where cocoa beans are tenderly grown and processed to meet the scrutiny of international quality controls. The end product is a painstakingly nurtured commodity valued like no other in the world. The same cannot be said of the children working the land.

That’s because the global agriculture industry continues to yield one particularly bitter crop: child labor. The big companies who run the massively profitable chocolate trade have done little to prevent trafficked and forced labor, and even less to address the poverty that pushes poor children into the fields. According to the field research just published by the International Labor Rights Forum, the problems that lead to child labor are more complex than the sad images we occasionally see of gaunt, cutlass-wielding kids in the fields. The global agricultural trade is structured to ensure that the most savage forms of resource extraction are linked into the most sophisticated commodities markets. Under this system, farmers are denied control over their production process and cannot negotiate fair prices or wages in the global marketplace.

The millions of farmers working in this decentralized production system have virtually no financial power over what happens to their crop en route to Western candy stores

Lynn Stuart Parramore: Shame is good, shame is right, and shame works

Society needs to motivate CEO Scrooges to change their ways

Does trumpeting scoundrels’ misdeeds set them straight? [..]

History shows that in cases when the law or public consensus has rendered an act reprehensible, society has contrived an impressive array of shaming devices – the dunce cap, the pillory, ducking chairs to plunge the guilty into rivers and ponds and tarring and feathering. The idea, of course, is to not only punish the culprits but also to deter other potential wrongdoers from following suit.

What would be appropriate for CEOs who pinch the wages of their employees while earning hundreds of times more than the lowest paid among them? A scarlet G for “greed” sewn to their lapels? Don’t laugh: Some judges have been known to get creative with sentencing when the ordinary route of punishment doesn’t seem to work. A Los Angeles Times op-ed noted that a judge in La Habra, California, ordered a slumlord to live in his own rundown building under house arrest for two months, and a Cleveland judge sentenced a man who had bullied a neighbor and her handicapped children to stand on the side of the highway carrying a sign describing his crimes. Perhaps a judge equipped with the latest CEO pay disclosures could sentence some corporate titan found guilty of stealing wages to live on the salary of his lowest-paid employee for a time. There is something rather satisfying about ideas like that.

Shaming may not bring America’s corporate Scrooges immediately around to a Dickensian redemption, but it can play a key role in creating a societal consensus that certain behaviors are indeed disgraceful – and that’s a start. No shame, no blame, you might say.

Two weeks before New York Senator Charles Schumer once again delivered for Wall Street with the omnibus budget deal, he gave a major speech in which he sounded like a progressive champion. Schumer offered a stirring defense of government as the only force that can stand up to the private sector’s attack on the middle class, and argued that for Democrats to “roll to victory in 2016… First, we must convince Americans that government can be on their side and is not just a tool of special interests.” [..]

Unfortunately, Schumer embodies the contradictions that will tear the Democratic Party apart over the next two years. He understands the need to embrace a populist, progressive narrative and program, but his ties to Wall Street and big money lead him to blunt any real moves by Democrats to take a bold stand for working people against corporate power.

The budget proposal to allow more government bailouts of banks that gamble with their depositors’ money was a huge lost opportunity for Democrats to paint Republicans as being on the side of the big banks that wrecked the economy. That opportunity was negated by President Obama’s pushing for the budget and Senator Schumer’s stealth maneuvers (widely known in Congress) to keep the Wall Street deal intact. As a result, the leaders of both parties demonstrated, as they’ve done before, that government is in fact on the side of the rich and powerful.

Jeff Biggers: Dear media: Stop using the phrase ‘clean coal’

Journalists are enabling a deadly industry

You’d think the filing of a class action lawsuit last month by the families of the 78 coal miners killed in the 1968 Farmington, West Virginia, mine explosion – a disaster that led to the establishment of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act – would serve as a painful reminder that coal isn’t clean.

But familiar headlines about “clean coal” endeavors – the coal industry’s still experimental carbon capture and storage operations – continue to roll off the newswires. [..]

“Clean coal” is an industry marketing term. Failing to enclose it in quotes, which the AP Stylebook does not require, and instead presenting it as a demonstrable fact is inaccurate and lazy – and offensive. It also makes a mockery of the miners and journalists who employ the term.

Coal is dirty, costly and deadly. It’s time all media venues stop using the phrase “clean coal” as though it were truthful reporting – because by touting the PR-speak of energy companies, the media are enabling a deadly and outlaw industry.

Joe Nocera: Shale and the Falling Price of Oil

Six years ago, the price of oil went on an incredible roller-coaster ride. In January 2008, oil hovered around $90 a barrel. By July, it had reached $147 a barrel. By the end of the year, it had plunged to under $35 a barrel. [..]

We tend to think of OPEC as a cartel whose goal is to set the price of oil – and set it high. But stability is also an important goal. Without a cartel controlling supply, oil can be the most volatile of commodities. [..]

And then, of course, there is the effect of the shale revolution in the United States, where oil production has nearly doubled, to nine million barrels a day from five million a day, in the space of six years. The conventional wisdom holds that the Saudis “fear” the influx of shale oil onto the market – as The Wall Street Journal put it on Monday – and that they want to see the price go down in order to drive out some of that shale production.

But the Saudis don’t really fear shale oil. “I’ve heard officials in Saudi Arabia call shale a blessing,” said Robert McNally, the founder and president of The Rapidan Group, who is also affiliated with the Center on Global Energy Policy. “Shale oil is light,” he added. “Saudi oil is medium and heavy, and their real competitors are the Iraqis and the Iranians.” The Saudis can adjust to shale oil more easily than many other countries.

Jacob Heilbrunn: The Real Threat to Hillary Clinton: Jim Webb

THE conventional wisdom is that Hillary Rodham Clinton will be almost impossible to dislodge from the Democratic presidential nomination and that even if she does encounter some hiccups, they will come from her left flank on economic policy. But if Mrs. Clinton runs, she may face a serious and very different threat: her own foreign policy record. While she can pretty much split the difference with any primary opponents on economic policy, the divisions over foreign affairs could be a lot harder to paper over for Mrs. Clinton, who has been tacking to the right on Iran, Syria and Russia in anticipation of Republican assaults during the general election.

This is why it isn’t really the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren who should worry the Clinton camp. It’s the former Virginia senator Jim Webb, a Vietnam War hero, former secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, novelist and opponent of endless wars in the Middle East. Late last month, Mr. Webb formed an exploratory committee. “He’s a very long shot,” Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “He has to become a serious candidate. At that point she would find him much more complex than dealing with liberals. He’s not a liberal, but a lot of what he says might appeal to liberals. He does not get carried away by humanitarian intervention.”

A cop pointing a gun at me as a “joke” and a cop getting a bullet in his head are no parallel, to be sure, but no one – cops included – should have to live even under the threat of violence, which is a form of violence itself.

So we must not let these brutal cop killings stop an honest movement built on affirming justice and peace.

We must not allow more police departments to adopt a ‘wartime’ mentality, just when we thought we were getting somewhere after the War on Terror military reenactments in Ferguson this summer.

We must not let protesters become labeled “domestic enemy combatants”, and we must not allow episodes where the script gets flipped to become an excuse to surveil black man even more.

And we must not give in to our most base anxieties, especially by indulging the fears of those who have guns and who are still, even after everything this year, expected to “serve and protect” us.

All of this violence is connected. We owe it to those taken from us too early – from the woman in Baltimore, to young black men in Ferguson and Ohio and beyond, and certainly to those two NYPD cops in their squad car in Brooklyn and their families – to break the American cycle of violence, even when it starts spinning in reverse.

Paul Brandeis Raushenbush: The False Choice of Protesting for Justice and Supporting Our Police

I’m one of the millions of New Yorkers who woke up heartbroken today thinking of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos who were shot dead yesterday while sitting in their car in Brooklyn by Ismaaiyl Brinsley. [..]

Instead of having the deaths of Liu and Ramos further tear us apart, could this serve as a moment of bringing us together? Liu and Ramos are reminders to any who would demonize the police, that our law enforcement is made up of people of all races and backgrounds, who have families and who feel called to this duty to protect and serve.

The families of Eric Garner and Michael Brown were among the first to condemn the killing of Ramos and Liu last night. The protests around the #BlackLivesMatter movement was never against the police, but it was a call to acknowledge that we can do better as a society that continues to bear the scars of racism.

That effort must continue; we can and must do better as a nation. But it will only be successful if everyone comes together and recognizes one another as human beings, deserving of respect, dignity and life.

Instead of pitting the deaths of Liu and Ramos against Garner and Brown, we can join them together, understanding them as martyrs whose inspire us on both sides of the blue line to work for a more just, safe and united America.

Michael Brenner:

Some political events mark their importance less by their content than by their timing, circumstances and presentation. That is the case for the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture. It contains little new to the attentive observer and none of that is of major consequence. It does, though, bear the imprimatur of the Senate — albeit with the abstention of Republicans. It appears at the culmination of a fierce White House campaign to prevent it from seeing the light of day. President Obama’s last minute “sky-is-falling” warnings that issuing the report would endanger the nation’s security was the exclamation point for a series of progressively more drastic measures that included the unconstitutional hacking of the Committee’s computers by the President and CIA Director John Brennan. [..]

The complicity of the White House in perpetuating the CIA mythology is the most troubling part of the story. President Obama went all the way down the line to prevent its exposure. Even now that the lie has been established between any reasonable doubt, he personally has thrown Brennan et al a life preserver in pronouncing himself neutral on the issue. In his official reaction to the Feinstein release the next day, Obama declared that that he will not take sides in the debate on whether torture worked. This is a striking example of Presidential irrationality — as well as irresponsibility. He is reacting as if a friend had asked him whether the Chicago Cubs should shell out $100 million+ for Jon Lester. That is a policy preference. Whether torture helped capture and kill OBL is a matter of fact — of truth or falsity. Leaving aside the inconvenient fact that he happens to be President of the United States, that that he already conspired with the CIA to block the report’s release and to prevent the ensuing embarrassment of the revelation that the torture program did not work (thereby already taking a position on the issue), one cannot logically abstain on a question of whether the sun rises in the East or the West.

Accountability for the country’s Intelligence agencies begins with the acceptance of responsibility in the White House.

Jim Popkin: Two double agents, a prison swap and the code from outer space: did this spy-v-spy duel save US-Cuban relations?

From a maximum-security prison in Texas, former United States military analyst Ana Montes has been offering up bumper-sticker justifications for why she betrayed her country and spied on behalf of the Cuban government over the course of 17 years. “I believe that the morality of espionage is relative,” Montes wrote in a private letter to a friend last year. “The activity always betrays someone, and some observers will think that it is justified and others not, in every case.”

Montes had no idea how prophetic her words would be. While the 57-year-old American citizen remains locked up as one of the most damaging spies in US history, the Cuban-born spy who led American investigators to Montes was set free to worldwide applause last week, during a landmark thaw in US-Cuban relations. Several news outlets have since identified the Cuban double-agent as Rolando Sarraff Trujillo, and multiple US officials I’ve interviewed this past week have described him as a cryptographer whose code-breaking secrets have been the gift that keeps on giving to the CIA, NSA and FBI.