Tag: Opinion

For years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been the most trusted agency in the federal government. In 2003, when Gallup did a survey to determine what the public thought of various federal agencies, the C.D.C. topped the list, with 66 percent of respondents describing it as “excellent” or “good.”

Last year, a similar Gallup poll showed that the C.D.C.’s approval rating had dropped to 60 percent, which was still better than any other agency. The C.D.C. has seen the country through SARS and the swine flu virus. The general perception was not only that it did important, apolitical work, but that it was highly competent. “I used to call the C.D.C. the shining star of federal agencies,” says Lawrence O. Gostin, a global health expert at Georgetown Law.

And then came Ebola.

Gary Younge: With so many issues off the agenda, no wonder the midterms are a turn-off

Elections offer little chance of change as Republicans and Democrats steer clear of hot-button topics for party advantage

Midterm elections, or as Stephen Colbert calls them “the most tedious fall chore of all”, are a strange affair. Nationwide votes without national candidates (much like parliamentary elections) where the president’s performance is on the minds of voters even when he’s not on the ballot. Turnout drops but the consequences can be considerable and the outcomes memorable: 1994 brought us Newt Gingrich and welfare reform; 2006 was the beginning of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid; 2010 was the Tea Party and Obama’s “shellacking”.

But the forthcoming midterms seem stranger than most even when they should, theoretically, be as interesting as any. There is something at stake – a real chance the Republicans, who already have the House, could win the Senate. The key races are scattered across the country, from Alaska to North Carolina, and are and volatile. At the time of writing there are 10 states in play, in seven of which the two parties are essentially tied.

But precious few are interested. According to the Pew Research Center], in the first week of October fewer people followed stories about the midterms than they did stories about the bombing of Isis, the secret service scandal at the White House or the Ebola outbreak. Four years ago, when Pew conducted an identical poll at the same point in the cycle, twice as many were following the elections. A poll in 2006 revealed that 70% were talking politics with their family and friends, 43% were talking politics at work, and 28% were talking about it at church.

Joe Conason: Let Obama and the CDC Do Their Jobs

If the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind, then even the possibility of infection with Ebola should do the same-for all of us. Instead, we seem easily distracted by attempts to blame President Barack Obama and to scapegoat the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Republican politicians and media loudmouths have even demanded the resignation of Dr. Thomas Frieden, the CDC’s director, because he’s refused to endorse a West African travel ban.

They’re all dead wrong. [..]

we will need in the months to come is a fresh assessment of our foreign aid programs. We need to understand why our traditional stinginess does both our country and our children a terrible disservice. Our best hope for survival, in the long term, is to notice how small our world has become-and to recognize that protecting our fellow human beings everywhere is the only way to protect ourselves.

In the Middle Ages, the call for a crusade to conquer the Holy Land was met with cries of “Deus vult!” – God wills it. But did the crusaders really know what God wanted? Given how the venture turned out, apparently not.

Now, that was a long time ago, and, in the areas I write about, invocations of God’s presumed will are rare. You do, however, see a lot of policy crusades, and these are often justified with implicit cries of “Mercatus vult!” – the market wills it. But do those invoking the will of the market really know what markets want? Again, apparently not.

And the financial turmoil of the past few days has widened the gap between what we’re told must be done to appease the market and what markets actually seem to be asking for.

Hannah Giorgis: The problem with the west’s Ebola response is still fear of a black patient

Ebola is now a stand-in for any combination of ‘African-ness’, ‘blackness’, ‘foreign-ness’ and ‘infestation’ – poised to ruin the perceived purity of western borders and bodies

Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to die of Ebola in the United States, was not the right kind of victim for the west: he wasn’t a pretty young woman smiling in sunglasses as a Cavalier King Charles spaniel named Bentley licks her cheek; he didn’t have a young, benevolent doctor’s face that looks “appropriate” plastered on newspapers; he wasn’t a kindly older nurse who told reporters how God had spared her. He wasn’t the kind of person to whom primetime news specials would dedicate 20 minutes and glorify with quotes from loved ones about his kind spirit or ceaseless determination to overcome an unfair affliction.

Thomas Eric Duncan was black, he was poor, and he was African.

A Dallas hospital turned away the uninsured Liberian immigrant after an initial exam concluded he suffered only from a “low-grade viral disease“, and the media turned him into the unsympathetic, undeserving face of a contagion with which the west is frantically grappling.

Peter van Buren: Seven Worst-Case Scenarios in the Battle with the Islamic State

You know the joke? You describe something obviously heading for disaster-a friend crossing Death Valley with next to no gas in his car-and then add, “What could possibly go wrong?”

Such is the Middle East today. The U.S. is again at war there,  bombing freely across Iraq and Syria, advising here, droning there,  coalition-building in the region to loop in a little more firepower from a collection of recalcitrant allies, and searching desperately for some non-American boots to put on the ground.

Here, then, are seven worst-case scenarios in a part of the world where the worst case has regularly been the best that’s on offer. After all, with all that military power being brought to bear on the planet’s most volatile region, what could possibly go wrong?

The headlines shift hourly between Ebola and ISIS. The question is often asked, “Should we put boots on the ground?” The answer is yes-but not in the Middle East. We need tens of thousands of boots on the ground dealing with Ebola: boots of doctors, nurses, health professionals, dealing with this wholly preventable global health disaster.

Ebola is a small virus that is revealing very large problems with the world’s public health systems. The few known cases here in the United States have provoked a climate of fear and a growing awareness of just how vulnerable we are to a virulent illness let loose in our society. Imagine how people feel in the impoverished West African nations of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, where the number of cases is in the thousands, and the infrastructure is simply incapable of dealing with the burgeoning number of infected people. [..]

The small island nation of Cuba has sent more than 160 doctors to West Africa to treat patients and help stem the spread of this epidemic. We should learn from Cuba. Instead, President Barack Obama sent in the Marines. They will soon be building field hospitals. But who will staff these new facilities? United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has created an emergency task force to confront the Ebola crisis. The world must come together to save lives and stop this preventable catastrophe that threatens us all.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: When Government Was Good

Tom Wolf’s mood is sunny but his words are serious.

He’s answering teachers’ questions at an elementary school featured last year in a New York Times story about the costs of overcrowding and underinvestment. The Democratic nominee for governor, Wolf criticizes Pennsylvania incumbent Tom Corbett for education cuts, but he is not terribly partisan about it. Wolf is a businessman who also holds a Ph.D. in political science, and he offers a brief commentary on the importance of “public goods,” not a term typically invoked on the stump.

He ends a lengthy response about pensions with an apology. “Am I giving you more information than you want here?” he asks with a smile. [..]

Democrats may find solace in other governors’ races as well, but Wolf will stand out as an unusual politician who speaks to two of the main sources of popular discontent: unhappiness with the economic system over its failure to deliver for so many workers, and widespread alienation from government.

Dave Johnsom: Budget Cuts Don’t Save Money

Cutting federal spending doesn’t “save money” – certainly not the way conservatives in Congress and in the states have been doing it.

If you cut the Internal Revenue Service budget, that obviously increases the deficit because it lowers the government’s ability to collect tax revenue. If you cut the infrastructure budget, obviously after a while bridges start to fall down. That costs money. And lives.

And, of course, if you cut the health and research budgets, diseases can spread and cures are not found. An article in Scientific American magazine by an infectious disease specialist spells out the consequences as the United States deals with the threat of the Ebola virus; [..]

For all you Republicans out there, here’s the thing: When us “takers” get diseases, they can spread to you “makers.” We actually are all in this together.

Cutting Food For Seniors Puts Them In The Hospital

In last year’s “Here’s A Sequester Cut You’ll Feel In Your Gut,” I wrote about how Republican cuts in food aid for seniors actually causes the government to spend more, because of what happens to seniors when you stop giving them food.

Mairead Maguire: The Disturbing Expansion of the Military-Industrial Complex

How can we explain that in the 2lst century we are still training millions of men and women in our armed forces and sending them to war?

There are more choices than war or peace, there are multi-optional choices and a civilian-based non-military diplomatic-political policy has more chance of succeeding in solving a violent conflict.

In war, the cost in civilian lives is incalculable, not to mention the many military personnel whose lives are destroyed.  Then there is the cost to the environment and the cost to human potential as our scientists waste their lives planning and researching even more horrific weapons which increasingly, in modern war, kill more civilians than combatants. [..]

But, why are we surprised at this cruelty of military when they are doing what they are trained to do – kill, at the behest of their politicians and some people?

In 1983, when the Department of Health and Human Services assembled the first task force to examine women’s health issues, the appointed experts made it clear that the defining challenges weren’t only related to differences between men and women but also to inequality between some women and others. One fact the panel noted in its final report was that Hispanic women died in childbirth three times as often as white women; black women died four times more frequently. “If a woman is a member of an ethnic or a cultural minority,” the report (pdf [..]

The state-by-state examination of women’s health disparities suggests that they aren’t just historical holdovers but are exacerbated by a recent political decision: the refusal to expand Medicaid. Most of the states receiving low grades for women’s health in the Alliance report were among the twenty-one that have refused to accept federal money through the Affordable Care Act to expand their Medicaid programs. That decision stranded many people in a coverage gap-too poor to qualify for subsidies on the insurance exchanges and too wealthy to meet their state’s Medicaid eligibility criteria. As The New York Times noted last year, black Americans are disproportionately affected.

Jessica Valenti: Abortion isn’t about the right to privacy. It’s about women’s right to equality

Katha Pollitt is right: we should redefine why we are pro-choice and why the pro-life movement is anti-woman

There are certain polite terms that even the most well intentioned, prudent pro-choice people use when they talk about abortion. The most difficult decision. Tragic. Safe, legal and rare. But as state after state makes abortion effectively illegal in the United States – and as the anti-choice movement prepares for a US supreme court fight to end the right entirely – it’s time for the pro-choice movement to lose the protective talking points and stop dancing around the bigger truth: Abortion is good for women.

In Katha Pollitt’s new book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, she argues that, as much as abortion is a private medical decision, it’s also a necessary public good. “We should accept that it’s good for everyone if women only have the children they want and can raise well,” she writes. The Nation columnist and long-time abortion rights supporter continues:

 

Society benefits when women can commit to education and work and dreams without having at the back of their mind that maybe it’s all provisional, because at any moment an accidental pregnancy could derail them for life.

[..]

Thus, as Pollitt and others have argued, the right to an abortion is fundamental to women’s equality, not just our privacy. Pollitt even notes that feminist legal experts – Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg among them – believe the supreme court should have made abortion legal on those grounds. After all, reproductive rights don’t end at our bodies.

Michele Goldberg: There Is No Constitutional Right to Harass Women Online

This week, Kathy Sierra published a long, raw and incisive blog post marking the ten years since receiving her first online threat.

If you’ve been following the sordid story of escalating misogynist harassment on the Internet, you know that Sierra was one of the first high-profile women to have her life turned upside down by a sadistic cyber mob. In her case, the mob was enraged less by anything she actually said than by her audacity at daring to build a public profile for herself. She initially came under attack for her popular tech blog, Creating Passionate Users, which had made her a sought-after speaker. The person who first threatened her “wasn’t outraged about my work,” she writes. “His rage was because, in his mind, my work didn’t deserve attention. Spoiler alert: ‘deserve’ and ‘attention’ are at the heart.” [..]

As I wrote recently, laws meant to address the abuse of women online can, at times, run afoul of the First Amendment, as in some state-level revenge porn laws. But there’s no constitutional right to post someone’s Social Security number, bombard their families and friends with naked pictures, libel them or threaten them with murder. The problem is that our laws and policies have lagged behind technology, allowing forms of abuse to proliferate online that we would never tolerate in the real world.

Last week the Congressional Budget Office reported that the deficit for the 2014 fiscal year that just ended was $460 billion, considerably lower than they had previously projected. This puts the deficit at 2.7 percent of GDP. At that level, the size of the debt relative to the economy is actually falling.

Not only is the deficit down sharply from its levels of 2009 and 2010, when it was near 10 percent of GDP, it is below the levels that even the deficit hawks had targeted back in those years. In other words, even if we had followed the lead of deficit crusaders like Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the deficit would be no lower today.

If anyone thought this would make the deficit hawks happy, they are badly mistaken. They are furious.

Jeff Madrick: How Laissez-Faire Economics Led to Inequality and Recession

Remember in 2009 when everyone was dodging blame for the financial crisis? Depending on who you asked, it was the bankers, the federal regulators, Fannie Mae, fraudster mortgage companies, the ratings agencies and the sub-prime borrowers themselves. The favorite claim of excuse makers was that no single group was to blame — it was a cluster-f*** as one journalist friend put it.

If everyone did it, no one could be held accountable. But it wasn’t true. Bankers and regulators were the major creators of the crisis, for their neglect and single-minded self-aggrandizement that often involved bending the rules.

But let me single out one group that avoided blame and deserved plenty of it: mainstream economists. The deeply held ideas of the nation’s most elite economists from the Right and the Left were direct causes of the crisis, justifying perverse behavior on Wall Street and in Washington, and careless and ignorant behavior at the Federal Open Market Committee of the nation’s central bank, the Federal Reserve.

These ideas did a lot of harm along the way — in particular, they were responsible for slower than necessary economic growth that resulted in higher unemployment and inequality.

Robert Creamer: Republican Right Embraces Its Long, Hypocritical Tradition of Pandering to Fear

They’re back. Like the fourth sequel to a bad horror movie, the Republican Right has once again chosen to embrace its long ignoble, hypocritical tradition of pandering to — and stoking — fear.

As the election nears, their ads are filled with images of ISIL terrorists, Ebola viruses, Secret Service breaches, and “porous” borders through which knife-wielding Muslim extremists are surely infiltrating every corner of our society.

It’s not just disgusting. It’s also hypocritical. The fact is that the Republicans have an abysmal record when it comes to defending the security of ordinary Americans. [..]

But this is nothing new. Right-wing demagogues have perfected their techniques for appealing to our darkest fears for decades. It’s embedded in their DNA.

John Nichols: How Can You Tell If US Hospitals Are Prepared for Ebola? Ask a Nurse.

With Sunday’s confirmation that an ICU nurse at a Dallas hospital that cared for a dying Ebola patient has tested positive for the deadly virus, President Obama ordered federal authorities to “take immediate additional steps to ensure hospitals and healthcare providers nationwide are prepared to follow protocols should they encounter an Ebola patient.”

That’s appropriate, as is the growing sense of urgency with regard to the level of readiness not just for the potential spread of Ebola but for other disease outbreaks.

This is not a time to panic. It is a time to get things right. [..]

Research is essential, but so too is basic preparedness.

The best way to determine if our hospitals are ready to respond is by asking a nurse. Or, to be more precise, nurses.

The answer, unfortunately, is that our hospitals are not up to speed.

Edward Snowden’s leaks are not isolated incidents – or, at least they won’t be when we look back on this era 10 years from now

Transparency is coming, whether the government likes it or not. The only question is whether they decide to bring it to the public before whistleblowers do it for them.

That’s the underlying message of Laura Poitras’ mesmerizing new documentary, Citizenfour about Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency that debuted at the New York Film Festival on Friday night. [..]

But what the government has failed to grasp is that Chelsea Manning and Snowden’s leaks are not isolated incidents – or, at least they won’t be when we look back on this era 10 years from now. There are 5 million people with security clearances in this country, and many of them are part of a new generation that is far more critical of the blanket secrecy permeating government agencies than the old guard.

It’s only now that we are finally starting to see the reverberations of Manning’s and Snowden’s whistleblowing. But one thing is for sure: there are many more potential whistleblowers out there, and if government officials do not move to make their actions more transparent of their own volition, then their employees may well do it for them.

Robert Kuttner: More Trade Agreements Won’t Fix Austerity

The U.S. economy is growing slowly and Europe’s hardly at all. The stock market lurch last week is a belated acknowledgement that our two economies share a common affliction, and Europe suffers more seriously. The affliction is austerity.

And yet the main remedy being promoted by the U.S. government and its European allies is a trade and investment deal known as T-TIP, which stands for the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. According to the deal’s sponsors, T-TIP would help stimulate recovery by removing barriers to trade and promoting regulatory convergence and hence investment.

The proposed deal is not popular in the U.S. Congress, which has to approve negotiating authority. The administration, say well-placed sources, hopes to cram through the necessary approval during the lame duck session of Congress after the November 4 election. That still will not assure approval, because the deal is also increasingly unpopular in Europe.

There are several big things wrong with T-TIP.

A war-weary American public that a year ago resoundingly rejected US military intervention in Syria to overthrow the Assad regime now is rallying behind the use of force to destroy the so-called Islamic State (ISIS). In just three months, from June to September, support for US airstrikes in Iraq soared from % percent to 71%, and to 65% for airstrikes in Syria.

How did such an astounding turnabout occur? Certainly it wasn’t due to the persuasive powers of President Obama, who seems to have been reluctantly dragged into a conflict that he once acknowledged has no military solution.

The credit for selling Obama’s war on ISIS must go to the mainstream American media.

Day after day, night after night, the press relied on propaganda from both ISIS and the US government to whip up fear and a thirst for revenge in the American public. Gruesome beheading videos distributed by ISIS were played over and over. The media not only regurgitated official US messages but packaged them better than the government itself ever could.

Arvina Martin: Scott Walker lost his fight for voter ID. He’s still everything that’s wrong with the GOP

My governor’s ‘pro-business’ policies aren’t, he’s facing corruption charges and he tried to keep grandmothers from voting. He cares less about Wisconsin than running for president

When Scott Walker ran for governor of Wisconsin in 2010, he portrayed himself as an affable, thrifty guy, who brought his lunch to work in a brown paper bag just like the people he promised to serve. He promised in his campaign that his pro-business reforms would bring 250,000 jobs to the beleaguered state’s manufacturing base. And he swore he’d be different than all those other politicians who’d come before.

The governor that Walker became in office is decidedly a different character than the average Joe we saw on the campaign trail: a governor whose political aspirations lie far beyond Madison. Governor Walker is facing charges of illegally steering campaign donations and backing terrible environmental legislation from those donors. He couldn’t find it in his heart to reach out to LGBT Wisconsinites and congratulate them on their new right to marry. He’s still backing a voter ID law that would disenfranchise the state’s elderly, minority, and low income voters in the hopes that’ll it’ll keep him in office, even though the US supreme court blocked it in an emergency ruling on Thursday.

And that’s just in the last month.

Alba Morales: Kids Shouldn’t Be at Rikers, Period

New York State’s top corrections official said this week that he supports moving all adolescent inmates off Rikers Island. His statement raises hopes for an end to what the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, in a scathing recent report, called a “deep-seated culture of violence” against youth in the United States’ second-largest jail, where the vast majority of inmates are adults. [..]

The adult criminal system is not equipped to take children’s needs and traits — and special rights — into account at any stage of the prosecution process. Unlike a juvenile court, the adult system is punitive by design. Once convicted in adult court, children acquire adult criminal records that can haunt them for the rest of their lives. A criminal conviction obtained at age 16 can prevent a person from getting a job decades later, and can make it difficult to obtain housing and student loans. In researching a recent report, I spoke to dozens of kids who had been prosecuted in the adult criminal justice system in Florida. They reported being confused by court proceedings, abused in the adult institutions where they were incarcerated, and plagued by records that branded them criminals for life. “I felt like my life was gone,” one 17-year-old, in adult prison for a crime he committed at 16, told me. I can’t imagine that New York’s children fare any better when put through the adult system.

People younger than 18 cannot vote, drink, or rent a car in any US state. Just this year, New York raised the age at which someone can buy cigarettes to 21. Yet the state continues to treat all 16- and 17-year-olds charged with crimes as if they were adults. Fortunately, there is a growing campaign to raise the age at which a person can be prosecuted as an adult in New York, and Governor Andrew M. Cuomo has established a commission in support of that goal. Moving kids off Rikers Island would be an essential step, but that shouldn’t obscure the fact that the better approach would be not to treat adolescents as adults in the first place.

The clergy gathered in the second-floor conference room at the First Baptist Church here were pondering whether this midterm election might be different from other midterm elections.

The five African-American pastors and bishops represented diverse theological traditions, but all were profoundly unhappy over what North Carolina’s ultra-conservative state government in Raleigh had done to reduce access to the ballot box, cut education spending, and turn back money to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

The irony, said the Rev. Dray Bland, pastor of First Baptist on Apple-the street location distinguishes it from the predominantly white First Baptist Church downtown-is that measures designed to make it harder for voters to cast ballots may actually inspire a larger number to do so.  

Joe Conason: What Ebola Can Teach Us

Even if Africa’s Ebola emergency never mutates into a global catastrophe, those of us who live in the world’s most fortunate country ought to consider what this fearsome virus can teach us. The lessons are quite obvious at this point-and contain implications that are political in the most urgent sense.

The tea party mania for shrinking federal budgets and rejecting international organizations-both of which are bedrock policy among the current Republican leadership-is not only bad for our national prestige but also exceptionally dangerous to our health. At the insistence of House leaders, whose answer to every problem has been cutting government and reducing taxes, the United States has steadily starved the budgets of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.

The disturbing consequence is that in both this country and the world, humanity lacks the full arsenal of weapons needed to combat Ebola and other potentially devastating outbreaks of tropical disease.

John Nichols: Chris Christie Defends The ‘Great American’ Koch Brothers

The Koch brothers like to meet in secret with their political minions. And, for the most part, the minions prefer to keep their interactions with the billionaire campaign donors on the down low.

But not Chris Christie.

The governor of New Jersey, who currently chairs that Koch-tied Republican Governors Association, and who well understands that a steady flow of dark money will be required to light up his 2016 presidential prospects, is elbowing everyone else aside in his mad rush to defend the billionaire brothers.

A Koch favorite who has appeared at secret summits organized in the past by the major donors to conservative causes and the RGA, Christie has been among their most vocal defenders in recent months. At the the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference, for instance, he hailed brothers Charles and David Koch as “great Americans who are creating great things in our country.”

Now, as the 2014 midterm elections approach, no one is championing the Kochs more aggressively than Christie-even if that means he has to grab the spotlight from candidates the embattled New Jerseyan is supposed to be assisting.

George Zornick: The Elephant in the Room With Leon Panetta

In his widely read blog of Beltway goings-on, Chris Cillizza made the following fairly obvious point about former defense Ssecretary Leon Panetta’s Obama-bashing media tour:

  What’s fascinating about this gripe with Obama is how much it plays into a) the argument that Hillary Clinton made against him in the 2008 presidential primary and b) the argument Hillary Clinton will likely make when (sorry, if) she runs for president in 2016. That argument, in short: I have been there and done that. I know what it takes to move the levers of power in Washington-and I am willing to do whatever it takes to make them move.

In addition, Panetta’s criticisms mainly involve Obama’s reluctance to use military force-also a fault line between Clinton and Obama, particularly on the matter of arming the Syrian rebels.

But the Beltway press shouldn’t be afraid to explicitly ask if Panetta is serving as an agent of Clinton’s official-but-not-yet-official presidential campaign. It’s not just that his criticisms dovetail with Clinton’s and are no doubt politically convenient for her as she attempts to draw a difference with the Obama administration-there are explicit ties to the shadow Clinton campaign that should make this question fair game.