Tag: Opinion

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

New York Times Editorial Board: Shunting the Homeless From Sight

Is homelessness a crime? The question was answered forthrightly in the negative last month by a federal appeals court ruling that struck down a Los Angeles ban on citizens’ living out of their automobiles as a desperate necessity in hard times. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit pronounced the ban – an important part of the city’s anti-homelessness campaign – to be a “broad and cryptic” law that “criminalizes innocent behavior.”

The ruling was an emphatic signal that the nation’s burgeoning problem of homelessness cannot be dealt with by simplistic attempts to criminalize behavior driven by the need to survive. Don’t count on the decision becoming the instant law of the land, however; a new study has exposed a rush by more and more cities to resort to punitive, unreasonable new laws to force the homeless out of sight and out of mind. [..]

But the crackdown laws and arrests are not, the study found, cost effective ways of dealing with homelessness. A Utah housing survey concluded that the cost of jail time and medical care for a homeless person was $16,670 a year against $11,000 for an apartment and care by a social worker. Affordable housing is clearly a wiser alternative.

For all the tough new laws, the homeless are still present. Local governments must face this fact with something better than punitive denial.

Richard (RJ) Eskoa: Are Disabled Americans Pawns in a Larger Social Security Game?

William Galston writes in the Wall Street Journal about a Republican senator’s plans to force a confrontation on government disability benefits. Though Mr. Galston doesn’t seem to see it this way, it sounds as if Sen. Orrin Hatch plans to hold benefits for disabled Americans hostage in order to force Social Security cuts on everyone.[..]

Right-wing wars of disinformation and demonization can be a wonder to behold, but the attacks on disabled recipients of Social Security benefits have been especially mean-spirited. Claims of “fraud” in the disability program are, simply put, counterfactual. There are other claims, too — that there’s an epidemic in malingering exacerbated by overly generous benefits, that poor screening and lax rules allow abled-bodied people to collect benefits, that there’s a widespread “double-dipping” problem, and that loopholes allow people to collect benefits while working.

Ana Marie Cox: Voter ID’s last stand: let’s finally declare laws what they are – racist on purpose

How is a concealed-carry gun permit OK to get in the voting booth, but an elderly woman’s Medicare card is not? Liberals have argued. Now it’s time for a verdict

This week, the US Department of Justice and the state of Texas started arguments in the first of what will be a summer-long dance between the two authorities over voting rights. There are three suits being tried in two districts over gerrymandering and Texas’s voter identification law – both of which are said to be racially motivated. In its filing, the DoJ describes the law as “exceed[ing] the requirements imposed by any other state” at the time that it passed. If the DoJ can prove the arguments in its filing, it won’t just defeat an unjust law: it could put the fiction of “voter fraud” to rest once and for all.

These battles, plus parallel cases proceeding in North Carolina, hinge on proving that the states acted with explicitly exclusionary intent toward minority voters – a higher standard was necessary prior to the Supreme Court’s gutting of Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) back in January. Under Section 3, the DoJ had wide latitude to look at possible consequences of voting regulation before they were even passed – the “preclearance” provision. Ironically, because the states held to preclearance had histories of racial discrimination, some of the messier aspects of the laws’ current intentions escaped comment.

Robert Reich: The Rise of the Non-Working Rich

In a new Pew poll, more than three quarters of self-described conservatives believe “poor people have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything.”

In reality, most of America’s poor work hard, often in two or more jobs.

The real non-workers are the wealthy who inherit their fortunes. And their ranks are growing.

In fact, we’re on the cusp of the largest inter-generational wealth transfer in history.

The wealth is coming from those who over the last three decades earned huge amounts on Wall Street, in corporate boardrooms, or as high-tech entrepreneurs.

It’s going to their children, who did nothing except be born into the right family.

Sadhbh Walshe: Jihad, justice and the American way: is this a model for fair terrorism trials?

The government stokes fear and fails to understand the Muslim world. But inside at least one courtroom remains an unusual precedent: context can be served

Sitting and waiting in US District Court here on Wednesday, you got the undeniable sense that something unusual was about to happen.

Here was the end of a terrorism trial with two men who had already pled guilty – the British citizen Babar Ahmad to providing material support for terrorism by way of administering a website that called on Muslims to devote themselves to jihad, which he did, and the British-born Talha Ahsan to helping him, despite being a mailman for the site for five months in 2001 – but both of whom still looked nervous in that familiar shackle-and-jumpsuit uniform of so many Muslim foreigners in this country over the past 13 years. [..]

Yet here was a terrorism trial about non-operational terrorism – about a website, and Ahmad’s visit to an Afghan training camp in 1999, and ultimately about over-aggressive prosecutors seeking 25 and 15 years, respectively – and here it was coming to a close not under the specter of xenophobia so much as all-American common sense.

No, Judge Janet Hall was not willing to entertain the Fox News-ification of terrorism. “There is no way to rationalize the sentences” the government had recommended, she said, at least not based on claims that two men promoted “violent jihad” and provided what is known as “material support” for terrorists. “In my view,” the judge said, “jihad does not equal terrorism. In a perversion of what Islam teaches, terrorists have misappropriated the concept of jihad from its true meaning – struggle. But jihad is not what happened on 9/11.”

Jessica Valenti: The campus rape problem doesn’t end at the gates. We need bigger solutions

The renewed focus on university sexual assault policies can’t blind us to the broader culture that allows rapists to operate with impunity

Recently, a friend told me about a campus rape case that actually ended well. The victim, who didn’t want to pursue the case with law enforcement, went to the college’s administrators. They investigated, began proceedings against the accused, and generally made all the right moves. The accused attacker didn’t admit to anything, but withdrew from school rather than be found guilty – and the campus now feels like a safe place for his victim.

As for the rest of the world, well: it just gained a sexual predator with no record to speak of.

Rape on college campuses is finally getting the attention it deserves – a White House task force, increased activism, an ongoing wave of media attention – and the concentration on such high rates of campus sexual assault as well as administrations’ typically poor response is especially needed.

But we can’t allow the renewed focus on campus rape to blind us to the broader culture that enables rapists to target victims – often without serious legal or social repercussions. And I mean everywhere, not just at college.

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Katrina vanden Heuvel: The Distorting Reality of ‘False Balance’ in the Media

False equivalence in the media-giving equal weight to unsupported or even discredited claims for the sake of appearing impartial-is not unusual. But a major media organization taking meaningful steps to do something about it is.

Earlier this month, the BBC’s governing body issued a report assessing the BBC’s impartiality in covering scientific topics. When it comes to an issue like climate change, the report concluded, not all viewpoints share the same amount of scientific substance. Giving equal time and weight to a wide range of arguments without regard to their credibility risks creating a “false balance” in the public debate.

This is a lesson for all media on both sides of the Atlantic-and not just when it comes to science coverage. There are many sides to almost every story, but that doesn’t mean they are automatically equal.

Ana Marie Cox: The GOP self-destruction is complete: millennials officially hate conservatives

The backlash machine has finally backfired with a generation that cringes at old people yelling at gay clouds

Conservatives are stuck in a perpetual outrage loop. The reappearance of Todd Akin, the horror-movie villain immortality of Sarah Palin, the unseemly celebration of the Hobby Lobby decision – these all speak to a chorus of “la-la-la-can’t-hear-you” loud enough to drown out the voice of an entire generation. Late last week, the Reason Foundation released the results of a poll about that generation, the millennials; its signature finding was the confirmation of a mass abandonment of social conservatism and the GOP. This comes at a time when the conservative movement is increasingly synonymous with mean-spirited, prank-like and combative activism and self-important grand gestures. The millennial generation has repeatedly defined itself as the most socially tolerant of the modern era, but one thing it really can’t stand is drama.

Republicans were already destined for piecemeal decimation due to the declining numbers of their core constituency. But they don’t just have a demographic problem anymore; they have stylistic one. The conservative strategy of outrage upon outrage upon outrage bumps up against the policy preferences and the attitudes of millennials in perfect discord.

Jessica Valenti: Abstinence sex education doesn’t work. It teaches lies to ill-informed virgins

Teens – whether you like the idea of them having sex or not – deserve information that can keep them healthy. Anything else is criminal

When you send your child off to school, you expect her to learn math, literature and science. Maybe some athletics thrown in for good measure. What most parents don’t count on, however, is for their kids to be told that condoms cause cancer and that women get cervical cancer because of “promiscuity”. Or that “each time a sexually active person gives that most personal part of himself or herself away, that person can lose a sense of personal value and worth.” Yet this is exactly the kind of nonsense taught to students every day thanks to religiously-based, abstinence-only sex education programs.

These false, ideologically-driven programs are turning out sexually illiterate young people whose lives and health are put in literal danger by “educators” handing out false information. All this, just so your teenager might be scared straight enough to forgo sex for a few extra months.

Joan Walsh: Wingnuts’ anti-child disgrace: From Murrieta to Oracle, America’s worst at it again

The GOP sheriff accused of threatening an ex with deportation foments protest — to scare away immigrant children

Waving yellow Gadsden flags and looking like refugees from Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch, dozens of immigration opponents have amassed on a local road in Oracle, Arizona, to block the expected transfer of 40 undocumented children from Central America to a nearby juvenile detention facility. So far the group, which includes members of the “patriot”/wingnut Arizona State Militia, has only blocked a bus carrying kids from a local YMCA. Like their friends in Murrieta, California, the Oracle heroes think the proper way to protest U.S. immigration policy is to threaten young children. [..]

Leadership is also coming from Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, who is trying to rival Maricosa County’s Joe Arpaio when it comes to macho intimidation of undocumented immigrants. Babeu, you may recall, had to abort a 2012 GOP congressional campaign when a gay ex-lover, who was Mexican, said Babeu threatened him with deportation if they broke up. (Babeu denied the charge.) Rather surreally, he’s become a national leader in the anti-immigration movement, and now he’s crusading against relocating 40 immigrant children to his county.

Michelle Chen: Hobby Lobby Is Now Discriminating Against a Transgender Employee

The Supreme Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Storesre revealed just how far the law now allows corporations to reach into women’s private lives. Now, another case against the same craft store chain is reaching into the ladies’ room as well.

Meggan Sommerville, a Hobby Lobby frameshop manager in Aurora, Illinois, has for years been shut out of the store’s bathroom because her boss insists that, as a trans woman, she cannot use the facilities. She is pressing a discrimination case with the Illinois Human Rights Commission, contending that the ban is both insulting and illegal under state laws barring discrimination in both employment and in public accommodations. The lockout has become a full-fledged civil rights battle-and perhaps the next legal showdown in the debate around corporate personhood, religion and civil rights at work. [..]

Although Sommerville brought her case under Illinois state law, advocates hope a ruling in her favor could set a precedent for other states’ treatment of transgender people under the rubric of civil rights and labor law.

But whatever Hobby Lobby does in the political arena, Sommerville is primarily anxious about how she’s treated when she shows up at work each day-to do a job that she still loves. She’s just waiting for her employer to recognize what her coworkers and her community have already accepted.

Jessica Grove: Parents Are Now Getting Arrested for Letting Their Kids Go to the Park Alone

Debra Harrell, 46, let her 9-year-old daughter play outside alone at the park. The South Carolina child had a cellphone she could use to call her mother in case of emergency. On the girl’s third day alone at the park, someone asked her where her mother was. The girl said her mom was at work. (Harrell works at McDonald’s and didn’t want her daughter to have to sit inside the restaurant for hours on a beautiful summer day.) The result? Harrell was arrested for “unlawful conduct towards a child” and put in jail; her daughter is now in the custody of the department of social services.

Most commentatorssave for a few busybodies interviewed by the local news who nattered on about the possibility of the child being abducted by a strange man, something that’s extremely rarethink that authorities went way too far in arresting Harrell. It angers me, as a citizen, to see the police overreach this way. How is it benefiting this child to be put in the custody of social services? And since I’m a parent, Harrell’s arrest scares me: How can I appropriately parent my child when doing something that seems relatively safe, if out of fashion, can get you arrested?

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Robert Sheer: Citigroup: The Original Gangsta

Barack Obama’s Justice Department on Monday announced that Citigroup would pay $7 billion in fines, a move that will avoid a humiliating trial dealing with the seamy financial products the bank had marketed to an unsuspecting public, causing vast damage to the economy.

Citigroup is the too-big-to-fail bank that was allowed to form only when Bill Clinton signed legislation reversing the sensible restraints on Wall Street instituted by President Franklin Roosevelt to avoid another Great Depression.

Those filled with Clinton nostalgia these days might want to reflect back on how truly destructive was his legacy for hardworking people throughout the world who lost so much due to the financial shenanigans that he made legal. [..]

In 2000, just before leaving office, Clinton went much further in radical deregulation of the financial industry when he signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. In one swoop this eliminated from the purview of any existing regulation or regulatory agency the new financial products, including the mortgage-backed securities at the heart of the financial meltdown and the subject of the $7 billion fine levied in what has to be viewed as a copout deal.

This is not just because the fine is paltry compared with the far greater damage Citigroup wreaked upon working Americans who lost so much but because, without a trial, there will be no public accountability of the cynicism that Citigroup’s leaders visited upon unknowing consumers.

Dean Baker: Fun Accounting and the Export-Import Bank

The establishment types in Washington have become really worried in recent weeks because one of their major troughs, the Export-Import Bank, may not be reauthorized by Congress. The Ex-Im Bank has long been a favored source of below market loans for Boeing, General Electric, and other major companies. If these companies have to pay market interest rates on their loans, it will cost them tens of billions of dollars in profits over the next decade.

The problem became serious after Republican majority leader Eric Cantor’s surprise defeat in a Republican primary. As a close ally of big business, Cantor could be counted on to push through re-authorization of the Bank before the September 30 deadline for the current authorization. However his replacement as majority leader, Kevin McCarthy, is more likely to give in to Tea Party demands to end this subsidy to big business.

This prospect prompted the most hysteria among the Washington elite since the financial crisis threatened to lay waste to Wall Street following the collapse of Lehman. As we know, when major companies have their profits on the line, the pundits get worried and truth goes flying out the window.

David Dayen: Michelle Rhee’s minions meet their match: New anti-charter group declares war

High-profile Democrats — from Donna Brazile to Jennifer Granholm — are saying enough is enough re: charter-mania

The internal war among Democrats over education policy escalated another notch this weekend at the annual convention of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union in Los Angeles. Delegates savaged the “education reform” agenda as a corporate-led threat to “everything we hold dear.” And three high-profile party stalwarts announced the formation of Democrats for Public Education, to contest the reform agenda with a public-centered alternative. We’re likely to see proxy fights between these opposing forces for years to come.

For many years now, Democrats at the highest levels – including President Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan – have pursued a series of so-called reform policies, which include charter schools, test-based teacher evaluations and eliminations of tenure. The Race to the Top program, where the Education Department forced school policy changes as a condition for competing for additional funding support, engendered a quiet revolution in the classroom. Duncan famously called Hurricane Katrina “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans,” an example of his desire to overhaul school districts and break union power.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: 7 Reasons Consumers Won’t Love the $7 Billion Citigroup Deal

The Justice Department’s settlement with Citigroup was finally announced yesterday. A $7 billion settlement against a too-big-to-fail bank? What’s not to love?

We’ll answer that with another question: If the settlement that the Justice Department just negotiated with Citigroup is meant as punitive, why did Citigroup’s stock go up when the deal was announced? Reasons for the rise include the report of a good second quarter — a report which just happened to be released on the same day this deal was announced. [..]

These agreements leave criminal bankers with no incentive to mend their ways. They reinforce the message that they won’t be prosecuted, and allow them to keep their ill-gotten gains while shareholders (many of whom were defrauded by the bank itself) pick up the tab for their wrongdoing. And they allow a too-big-to-fail bank with an extensive record of fraud to remain a systemic threat.

If you’re looking for a silver lining, here it is: The administration is clearly feeling the heat about its treatment of Wall Street. Otherwise the rhetoric wouldn’t be quite as stern and the settlement figures would probably be lower. But that’s not a reason for the public to settle for deals which leave perverse incentives — and dangerous banks — in place.

Juan Cole: Rand Paul to Rick Perry: Why Send U.S. Troops to an Iraq that Won’t Defend Self?

Texas Gov. Rick Perry,  apparently considering another run for president (assuming he can remember to do it), attacked Rand Paul as an “isolationist,” calling him “blind” to the danger of international “terrorism” and pointing especially to the rise of the so-called Islamic State in northern Iraq. [..]

Rand Paul argues that Perry’s depiction of him as an isolationist is a caricature, and that in fact he and Perry agree on most of the steps the US should take in Iraq.  Paul even generously admits that both of them largely agree with President Obama on these steps:  “I support continuing our assistance to the government of Iraq, which include armaments and intelligence. I support using advanced technology to prevent ISIS from becoming a threat.”  He also allows that U.S. airstrikes on targets of the so-called Islamic State may be necessary.

Paul says that where he differs with Perry is that he would not send ground troops back into Iraq.

He also suggests that the policy of the U.S. and its allies of trying to train and arm Syrian rebels has backfired, and that many of these U.S.-backed fighters have defected to IS and other al-Qaeda offshoots. That is, interventionist policies in Syria are in part responsible for the Iraq imbroglio.

Jeff Cohen: Hillary’s Candid Motto for Democratic Party: ‘Represent Banks’

In 1992, a 44-year-old attorney made the following remarkable assertion: “For goodness’ sake, you can’t be a lawyer if you don’t represent banks.”

The attorney was Hillary Clinton. She made the statement to journalists during her husband’s first campaign for president. Her legal representation of a shady savings and loan bank while working at a top corporate law firm in Arkansas (and her firm’s relations with then-governor Bill Clinton) had erupted briefly into a campaign controversy.

Mainstream pundits rarely mentioned Hillary Clinton’s extraordinary statement about lawyers and banks. Instead, they obsessed over and immortalized a remark she made minutes later — her feminist appeal: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was pursue my profession.” [..]

More importantly, Clinton’s comment speaks to the decline of the Democratic Party as a force that identifies with the broad public, those who often get stepped on by big banks and unbridled greed. Her remark is an apt credo for a party leadership that has spent the last quarter-century serving corporate power (through Wall Street deregulation, media dereg, NAFTA-style trade pacts, etc.) as persistently as it spews out empty rhetoric about “the needs of working families.”

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

David Sirota: Corporate Welfare Gets a Boost From Democrats

In politics, as the old saying goes, there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies-there are only permanent interests. Few policy debates prove that truism as well as the one now brewing over the Export-Import Bank-a government agency providing taxpayer subsidized loans to multinational corporations.

This tale starts 15 years ago when my old boss, U.S. Rep. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, was trying to construct a left-right coalition to reform the bank. While a few libertarians were willing to voice free-market criticism of the bank, the impetus for reform was primarily among Democrats and the left. Indeed, Sanders’ failed 2002 amendment proposing to restrict the bank’s subsidies garnered only 22 Republican votes but had 111 Democratic backers-mostly progressive legislators who, in the words of Sanders, saw the Ex-Im Bank program as “one of the most egregious forms of corporate welfare.” [..]

Fast forward to the last few years. In 2012, Democrats rammed a bill reauthorizing the bank through the Senate, and Obama held a public ceremony to sign the reauthorization bill into law. At the same time, Republicans provided most of the congressional votes against the bank. And now, in the last few weeks, the GOP’s new House majority leader is threatening to block the next authorization bill and thus completely shut the bank down.

This tale is not just another “I was for it before I was against” anecdote. It is also a bigger parable providing a two-pronged lesson: Partisan politics can abruptly shift; yet money politics almost never changes.

Jochen Bittner: Spies Like Us

Is it because they know us so little – or because they know us too well – that the Americans can’t stop spying on us Germans?

It is a question worth pondering after last week’s revelation that American agents had recruited at least one member of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, and may have done the same with a high-ranking defense official. In response, the German government denounced the “stupidity” of the C.I.A. and expelled its top man in Berlin.  [..]

Against this backdrop, it is hard to qualify the latest scandal as mere stupidity. The N.S.A. revelations could at least be dismissed as an unfortunate but inadvertent result of mission overreach; developing human intelligence sources within the German government is another matter. To many Germans, America’s continuing espionage against one of its supposedly closest allies smacks of arrogance and disrespect.

Ted Rall: Those Kids Crossing the Border From Mexico Wouldn’t Be There If Obama Hadn’t Supported a Coup the Media Doesn’t Talk About

If you’re reading this, you probably follow the news. So you’ve probably heard of the latest iteration of the “crisis at the border”: tens of thousands of children, many of them unaccompanied by an adult, crossing the desert from Mexico into the United States, where they surrender to the Border Patrol in hope of being allowed to remain here permanently. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention and hearing system has been overwhelmed by the surge of children and, in some cases, their parents. The Obama Administration has asked Congress to approve new funding to speed up processing and deportations of these illegal immigrants. [..]

The fact that Honduras is the biggest source of the exodus jumped out at me. That’s because, in 2009, the United States government – under President Obama – tacitly supported a military coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras. “Washington has a very close relationship with the Honduran military, which goes back decades,” The Guardian noted at the time. “During the 1980s, the US used bases in Honduras to train and arm the Contras, Nicaraguan paramilitaries who became known for their atrocities in their war against the Sandinista government in neighbouring Nicaragua.”

Honduras wasn’t paradise under President Manuel Zelaya. Since the coup, however, the country has entered a downward death spiral of drug-related bloodshed and political revenge killings that crashed the economy, brought an end to law, order and civil society, and now has some analysts calling it a “failed state” along the lines of Somalia and Afghanistan during the 1990s.

Tom Engelhardt: An Exceptional Decline for the Exceptional Country?

For America’s national security state, this is the age of impunity.  Nothing it does — torture, kidnapping, assassination, illegal surveillance, you name it — will ever be brought to court.  For none of its beyond-the-boundaries acts will anyone be held accountable.  The only crimes that can now be committed in official Washington are by those foolish enough to believe that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.  I’m speaking of the various whistleblowers and leakers who have had an urge to let Americans know what deeds and misdeeds their government is committing in their name but without their knowledge.  They continue to pay a price in accountability for their acts that should, by comparison, stun us all.

As June ended, the New York Times front-paged an account of an act of corporate impunity that may, however, be unique in the post-9/11 era (though potentially a harbinger of things to come).  In 2007, as journalist James Risen tells it, Daniel Carroll, the top manager in Iraq for the rent-a-gun company Blackwater, one of the warrior corporations that accompanied the U.S. military to war in the twenty-first century, threatened Jean Richter, a government investigator sent to Baghdad to look into accounts of corporate wrongdoing. [..]

Think of the response of those embassy officials as a get-out-of-jail-free pass in honor of a new age.  For the various rent-a-gun companies, construction and supply outfits, and weapons makers that have been the beneficiaries of the wholesale privatization of American war since 9/11, impunity has become the new reality.  Pull back the lens further and the same might be said more generally about America’s corporate sector and its financial outfits.  There was, after all, no accountability for the economic meltdown of 2007-2008.  Not a single significant figure went to jail for bringing the American economy to its knees. (And many such figures made out like proverbial bandits in the government bailout and revival of their businesses that followed.)

Danny Schechter: The World Cup Spilleth Over: As the Soccer Games End, Political Ones Begin

The World Cup has spilleth over. With the  FIFA spectacle about to pack up its goodies-most of their lucre has already been wired out of Brazil-it’s time for hype for the next global spectacle, as the “host” country now tries to cope with its financial losses, intensified social conflicts and humiliating defeat at the hands of the Germans after earlier losing their star player to a nasty collision on the field,  and their valiant Captain to a penalty.

On a symbolic level, Brazil’s bashing at the feet of Germany using bum rush tactics compared to the Nazi “Blitzkrieg”  brought smiles to Old Europe, and pain to a nation struggling with massive poverty and inequality.

In a way, it underscored the dependence and anger that so many Brazilians felt, even as the issues they have raising and marching to call attention to,  have  all been but ignored by the sportscasters who know game scores but not the scores of life-the great gaps that events like the World Cup paper over.

Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

Punting the Punditsis an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with George Stephanopolis: The guests for Sunday’s “This Week” are: Attorney General Eric Holder; Trayvon Martin’s friend Rachel Jeantel on the one year anniversary of his killer’s acquittal.

The guests at the roundtable are: Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol; Republican strategist Ana Navarro; former Obama White House senior adviser David Plouffe; and ABC News’ Cokie Roberts.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are: Ambassador Maen Rashid Areikat, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s chief representative in the United States; and Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX).

On a special immigration panel, the guests are: Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL); Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA); and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX).

His panel guests are: Jane Harman of The Wilson Center; Nia-Malika Henderson, the Washington Post; Danielle Pletka, the American Enterprise Institute; and Gerald Seib, The Wall Street Journal.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Sunday’s guests for MTP are: Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif; the Obama administration’s Mideast peace envoy, Martin Indyk; The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg; Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI); and Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX).

Sitting at the roundtable are: former Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D-MI); former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA); Stephen Henderson, Detroit Free Press; and Kimberley Strassel, The Wall Street Journal.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley’s guests are: Sen. John McCain (R-AZ); and Border patrol agent Chris Cabrera.

Her panel guests are Republican Reps. Marsha Blackburn and Aaron Schock; Democratic Reps. Donna Edwards and Beto O’Rourke.

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Heidi Mooore: Wall Street and Washington want you to believe the stock market isn’t rigged. Guess what? It still is

Michael Lewis woke up Average Joe investors, but the fat cats are still trying to lull you into financial submission with their intellectual dishonesty

Most Americans don’t think much about the stock market, and that’s just fine with Wall Street. Because once you wake up to how screwed up the stock market really is, the financial industry knows you’re likely to get very nervous and take your money out.

Many are catching on: between 2007 and 2014, investors pulled $345bn from the stock market. E-Trades are down and worries are up, with 73% of Americans still not inclined to buy stocks, five years after the financial crisis. [..]

So last week, Washington featured a lot of handwringing, in two separate Congressional panels, about how to convince Average Joe investors that the stock market is their friend – even when it obviously isn’t. And it’s great that elected officials and Wall Street millionaires are talking about investor confidence. But they’re not talking about what really matters: investor protection. Guaranteeing that everyone gets a fair shake. Un-rigging the stock market.

Yet in Congress, the worry is all about appearances.

Trevor Timm: The Senate is giving more power to the NSA, in secret. Everyone should fight it

Politicians are still trying to hand over your data behind closed doors, under the guise of ‘cybersecurity’ reform. Have we learned nothing?

One of the most underrated benefits of Edward Snowden’s leaks was how they forced the US Congress to shelve the dangerous, privacy-destroying legislation- then known as Cispa – that so many politicians had been so eager to pass under the guise of “cybersecurity”. Now a version of the bill is back, and apparently its authors want to keep you in the dark about it for as long as possible.

Now it’s called the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (Cisa), and it is a nightmare for civil liberties. Indeed, it’s unclear how this kind of law would even improve cybersecurity. The bill was marked up and modified by the Senate intelligence committee in complete secrecy this week, and only afterward was the public allowed to see many of the provisions passed under its name. [..]

The best thing the government could probably do for cybersecurity is get its own house in order, starting with upgrading its terribly old computer systems that, in some agencies, are running a version of Windows that’s so old, Microsoft doesn’t even update it for the public anymore. Many agency websites don’t use basic HTTPS encryption, others, like the FBI, don’t use other basic forms of encryption to protect their emails. Why does the NSA continue to stockpile software vulnerabilities that could be disclosed to companies like Microsoft to make all of us safe?

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Citigroup’s $7 Billion Fraud Deal: The Clique’s Still Clicking in DC

Pop quiz: Which bank is widely considered too big to fail, needed (and got) a $45 billion government loan during the financial crisis, recently failed a stress test performed by the Federal Reserve — and has enjoyed a revolving-door relationship with both the Clinton and Obama administrations?

If you answered Citigroup, congratulations.

Citigroup is back in the headlines as the result of a new settlement with the Justice Department over its mortgage fraud, reportedly for the sum of $7 billion. This deal is being trumpeted as a major win for the American people. It’s not. The money’s not enough (and some of it probably won’t be paid out), the wrong people are paying, and there will be no prosecutions for criminal behavior.

From a moral perspective, the lack of prosecutions is probably the most troubling aspect of this deal, and it keeps happening. Somehow the Justice Department is able to reach one billion-dollar settlement after another to resolve charges of massive criminality without indicting a single criminal.

Anthony Lowenstein: The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control

At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US, says whistleblower William Binney – that’s a ‘totalitarian mentality’

William Binney is one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA. He was a leading code-breaker against the Soviet Union during the Cold War but resigned soon after September 11, disgusted by Washington’s move towards mass surveillance.

On 5 July he spoke at a conference in London organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism and revealed the extent of the surveillance programs unleashed by the Bush and Obama administrations. [..]

The NSA will soon be able to collect 966 exabytes a year, the total of internet traffic annually. Former Google head Eric Schmidt once argued that the entire amount of knowledge from the beginning of humankind until 2003 amount to only five exabytes.

Binney, who featured in a 2012 short film by Oscar-nominated US film-maker Laura Poitras, described a future where surveillance is ubiquitous and government intrusion unlimited.

“The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control”, Binney said, “but I’m a little optimistic with some recent Supreme Court decisions, such as law enforcement mostly now needing a warrant before searching a smartphone.”

Michelle Chen: Obama’s new plan for detained migrant children militarizes immigration policy

Mass deportation will never address the underlying human rights crisis unfolding south of the US-Mexico border

President Obama vowed to do more for the nation’s children: boosting funding for early education, expanding subsidized childcare programs for working families – and now, asking for billions of dollars to kick tens of thousands of children out of the country. That last bit is reserved for a special group of kids, of course: the ones who came up to the border seeking to escape violence and economic devastation in their hometowns, to find family members, to seek shelter and for a chance at a decent life. And amid their pleas for recognition as refugees, the president is working with lawmakers to make them disappear. [..]

But instead, on Tuesday the White House requested $3.7bn in additional funding to launch a border “surge” to facilitate the legal process for the child migrants – with the ultimate aim of expediting deportations. And Obama has even suggested making these children easier to deport by altering existing laws that provide special protections and legal reprieve for children crossing the border from Central America. This, many politicians argue, will send a message that the United States is a “nation of laws“, in order to somehow deter other families from sending their children here in desperation. And yet in threatening wholesale deportation and eviscerating due process for five-year-olds, this supposed nation of laws opts to “secure the border” in the most brutish way possible: through the collective punishment of children and families.

Diane Ravitch: The Excellent But False Messaging of the Common Core Standards

Have you ever wondered about the amazingly effective campaign to sell the Common Core standards to the media, the business community, and the public? How did it happen that advocates for the standards used the same language, the same talking points, the same claims, no matter where they were located?

The talking points sounded poll-tested because they were. The language was the same because it came from the same source. The campaign to have “rigorous,” “high standards” that would make ALL students “college and career-ready” and “globally competitive” was well planned and coordinated. There was no evidence for these claims but repeated often enough in editorials and news stories and in ads by major corporations, they took on the ring of truth. Even the new stories that reported on controversies between advocates and opponents of the Common Core used the rhetoric of the advocates to describe the standards.

This was no accident.

Lyndsey Layton of the Washington Post reported that the Hunt Institute in North Carolina received more than $5 million from the Gates Foundation to organize support for the brand-new, unknown, untested Common Core standards. Organizing support meant creating the message as well as mobilizing messengers, many of whom were also funded by the Gates Foundation.

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

David Cay Johnston: Americans have lost out on $6.6 trillion

The inability to maintain 2000-level prosperity has cost us all

Why are so many Americans feeling squeezed economically even as the economy expands at an accelerating pace?

Last month set a new record for sustained job creation: 52 straight months of added jobs, with a robust 288,000 more jobs in June and more than 9 million jobs created since February 2010. The unemployment rate is down to 6.1 percent, and the number of long-term unemployed has been slashed, from about 5 million people to about 3 million.

The stock market is soaring, reaching a record high on July 3. The Dow Jones industrial average passed 17,000 – amazing compared with its Great Recession low of 6,627 in March 2009, just weeks after President Barack Obama took office.

So what’s missing? Why did Obama acknowledge in a television interview last week that the “underlying trend for middle class families, that they don’t feel, no matter how hard they work, they’re able to get ahead in the same way that their parents were able to get ahead.”

The answer lies in a very large sum of missing money – about $6.6 trillion by my count – over the first 12 years of this century. That’s as much money as everyone in the United States made from New Year’s Day 2012 through late September of that year. It may also explain Obama’s low approval ratings.

How could such a gigantic sum go missing and not get noticed?

Paul Krugman: Who Wants a Depression?

The story so far: For more than five years, the Fed has faced harsh criticism from a coalition of economists, pundits, politicians and financial-industry moguls warning that it is “debasing the dollar” and setting the stage for runaway inflation. You might have thought that the continuing failure of the predicted inflation to materialize would cause at least a few second thoughts, but you’d be wrong. Some of the critics have come up with new rationales for unchanging policy demands – it’s about inflation! no, it’s about financial stability! – but most have simply continued to repeat the same warnings.

Who are these always-wrong, never-in-doubt critics? With no exceptions I can think of, they come from the right side of the political spectrum. But why should right-wing sentiments go hand in hand with inflation paranoia? One answer is that using monetary policy to fight slumps is a form of government activism. And conservatives don’t want to legitimize the notion that government action can ever have positive effects, because once you start down that path you might end up endorsing things like government-guaranteed health insurance.

George Zornick: Did the CIA Illegally Spy on the Senate? Now We May Never Know

The Department of Justice will not investigate whether the Central Intelligence Agency illegally spied on staffers of the Senate Intelligence Committee and removed documents from committee servers, McClatchy confirmed Thursday. The CIA also claimed committee staffers took documents from the intelligence agency without authorization, and that claim will also not be investigated.

“The department carefully reviewed the matters referred to us and did not find sufficient evidence to warrant a criminal investigation,” Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr told McClatchy.

It’s a fizzling denouement to one of the more fascinating political dramas of the Obama era. Earlier this year, without any warning, Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein took the Senate floor and delivered a lengthy, forceful speech directly accusing the CIA of spying on private committee computers and removing sensitive documents. It was an unprecedented public eruption of tensions between the security state and the legislative branch.

John Nichols: The Senate Judiciary Committee Just Backed an Amendment to Overturn ‘Citizens United’

Constitutional amendments are often proposed but rarely advanced to the stage of serious debate. What moves any meaningful amendment from mere paperwork to serious consideration is the popular will of the great mass of Americans. And the popular will of the great mass of Americans have been abundantly clear since the United States Supreme Court struck down barriers to corporate control of democracy with its 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling.

Sixteen American states and roughly 600 communities have formally told Congress that the Constitution must be amended to make it clear that corporations are not people, money is not speech and citizens and their elected representatives have a right to organize elections that are defined by votes rather than dollars.

Zoë Carpenter: The GOP’s Completely Incoherent Stance on the Border Crisis

Republicans are furious about the flood of children streaming across the US-Mexico border, and are criticizing the president for not deporting the children fast enough. But now that Obama has asked for nearly $4 billion to help kick the kids out more quickly, they don’t want to fund the emergency measures. [..]

Most minors are simply handing themselves over to border patrol agents, suggesting that a porous border isn’t really the problem. And even if the border were completely sealed, there’s still the question of what to do with the tens of thousands of children here already. Perry ignored the fact that the Obama administration is bound by the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which bars the government from immediately deporting children from countries that do not share a border with the United States-such as Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, where the bulk of the children are from. The law requires border patrol to turn the children over to Health and Human Services and entitles them to due process so they may apply for humanitarian relief. Obama is trying to speed up deportations, to the consternation of immigrant rights and humanitarian groups. But unless Congress changes the trafficking law, the only way to do so is to make the legal system work faster by paying for more lawyers and judges.

Ana Marie Cox: Rick Perry just might be the lunatic the GOP is looking for in 2016

Republicans need a candidate who can do a quick two-step on immigration. Who better than a Texan?

Can Rick Perry – the one-time laughingstock who couldn’t overcome uncountable gaffes and wildly uneven stump performances to become the Republican nominee in 2012 – be the Republican party’s great red hope in 2016? Given a schizophrenic GOP and a political climate where one word – jobs – can trump most every concern, the answer, let me tell you, is … let’s see … sorry … oops … yes! And it’s precisely because his policy positions are as wildly unpredictable as his debate performances. [..]

He’ll have to weather some stumping, of course, and, of all the potential Republican presidential candidates, Perry stands to benefit the most from the shortened primary season and curtailed debate schedule. But it would behoove his naysayers to remember that his bad-to-weird stump performances in 2012 were a seeming anomaly in a retail politics career that once earned him comparisons v] to Bill Clinton and the [endorsement of a liberal state congresswoman “on personal grounds” during his first gubernatorial re-election campaign.

As for the Beltway establishment’s obsession with Perry’s gaffes, it’s almost not worth even asking the question if voters really care. Was George W Bush elected president? Gaffes are a feature of politicians and the electoral process, not a bug. Rick Perry puts on a good show. He may have ditched his cowboy boots for nerd glasses, but he’s still as captivating as a rodeo clown.

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

John Nichols: Teachers to Education Secretary Arne Duncan: Please Quit

Given the choice between Republicans who are explicitly committed to doing away with collective bargaining rights and Democrats, public-sector labor unions tend to back Democrats at election time.

But that does not mean that unions are always satisfied with Democratic Party policies-or with Democratic policymakers.

This is especially true with regard to education debates. There are certainly Democrats who have been strong advocates for public schools. But there are also Democratic mayors, governors, members of Congress and cabinet membeWar in Afghanistan: Enough Is Enoughrs such as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who have embraced and advanced “reforms” that supporters of public schools identify as destructive. [..]

Former US Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch, who has emerged as a leading champion of public education, refers to Duncan as “one of the worst Secretaries of Education”- arguing that “Duncan’s policies demean the teaching profession by treating student test scores as a proxy for teacher quality.

Teachers are pushing back against Duncan and those policies.Former US Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch, who has emerged as a leading champion of public education, refers to Duncan as “one of the worst Secretaries of Education” – arguing that “Duncan’s policies demean the teaching profession by treating student test scores as a proxy for teacher quality.

Teachers are pushing back against Duncan and those policies.

Rep. Alan Grayson: War in Afghanistan: Enough Is Enough

At the end of George Washington’s second term as President, in his 1796 farewell address to a grateful nation, Washington urged America to avoid foreign entanglements. [..]

Following the 9/11 attacks, we defeated an entrenched hostile military force in Afghanistan, playing defense, with fewer than 1000 U.S. Special Forces troops. We did so in barely a month. The battle was over, and the war was won Then our hubris-ridden military-industrial complex, led by a bellicose President who had gone AWOL himself from May 1972 to October 1973 and spent his entire presidency trying to make up for it, occupied that 12th-century nation with between 10,000 and 35,000 troops. Under President Obama, our occupying army then multiplied, to 100,000 soldiers.

Recently, President Obama announced a policy to “end the war” in Afghanistan by maintaining something like 9999 American troops there, for a long time to come. That’s the same number of American soldiers who occupied Afghanistan in the first place.

If you think that stationing just under 10,000 American troops in Afghanistan means that the war is over, then Big Brother has a few words for you: “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.”

Linda Sarsour: Don’t be shocked that the US spied on American Muslims. Get angry that it justifies spying on whomever it wants

There are two sets of laws here: one designed for dissidents, political activists and Muslims – and another for everybody else

What do a Republican candidate, a military veteran, a civil rights activist and a professor have in common? They are all American Muslims – and all have been subject to pervasive surveillance by the NSA and FBI.

A report published by The Intercept on Wednesday reveals that the two agencies used secretive procedures designed to catch terrorists and spies to monitor the email accounts of prominent American Muslim leaders. Among the documents supplied by Edward Snowden, a spreadsheet titled “FISA recap” contains 7,485 email addresses apparently monitored between 2002 and 2008. (The report also clearly documents how biased training by the FBI leads to biased surveillance, and that calling Muslims “ragheads” is everyday lingo at federal law enforcement agencies.)

These revelations demonstrate that there are two sets of laws in the United States: one designed for dissidents, political activists and American Muslims – and another for everybody else. But nobody is safe when one group is singled out: if our government can simply decide with little or no oversight to monitor the personal email account of an American Muslim Republican military veteran, then it can decide to monitor any of our emails, too. That should strike fear into the heart of every American who values our freedoms.

Jessica Valenti: Hillary Clinton must reject the stigma that abortion should be legal but ‘rare’

Agreeing with anti-choice activists on even that single word hurts women and the cause of reproductive rights

I support abortion rights. Being pro-choice means a lot of different things to me – among them, that abortion should be safe, legal, accessible, subsidized and provided with empathy and non-judgement.

You may have noticed a word missing there.

“Safe legal and rare” first became a pro-choice rallying cry during the Clinton administration, and has been invoked by media-makers and politicians like – even President Obama has called the mantra “the right formulation” on abortion. It’s a “safe” pro-choice answer: to support abortion, but wish it wasn’t necessary.

And it’s a framing that Hillary Clinton – perhaps the next president of the United States – supports.

But “safe, legal and rare” is not a framework that supports women’s health needs: it stigmatizes and endangers it.

Robert Creamer: Why Collective Bargaining Is a Fundamental Human Right

The ability for ordinary working people to organize and collectively bargain over their wages and working conditions is a fundamental human right. It is a right just as critical to a democratic society as the right to free speech and the right to vote.

Over the last 30 years many in corporate America and the big Wall Street banks have conducted a sustained attack on that human right. Unionization dropped from 20.1 percent of the workforce in 1983 to 11. 3 percent in 2013 — and the results are there for everyone to see.

During that period productivity and Gross Domestic Product per capita both increased by roughly 80 percent in America. But the wages of ordinary Americans have remained stagnant. Virtually all of the fruits of that increased productivity have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.

No wonder the gang on Wall Street opposes unions.

Michelle Chen: Obama’s new plan for detained migrant children militarizes immigration policy

Mass deportation will never address the underlying human rights crisis unfolding south of the US-Mexico border

President Obama vowed to do more for the nation’s children: boosting funding for early education, expanding subsidized childcare programs for working families – and now, asking for billions of dollars to kick tens of thousands of children out of the country. That last bit is reserved for a special group of kids, of course: the ones who came up to the border seeking to escape violence and economic devastation in their hometowns, to find family members, to seek shelter and for a chance at a decent life. And amid their pleas for recognition as refugees, the president is working with lawmakers to make them disappear.

If the White House and Congress wanted to begin to deal comprehensively with the “border crisis”, they would not be prioritizing “alien removal” but rather investing in emergency legal aid to these children, working to reunite them with their families whenever possible and granting them broad humanitarian relief as refugees.

But instead, on Tuesday the White House requested $3.7bn in additional funding to launch a border “surge” to facilitate the legal process for the child migrants – with the ultimate aim of expediting deportations. And Obama has even suggested making these children easier to deport by altering existing laws that provide special protections and legal reprieve for children crossing the border from Central America.

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Dear Democrats: Economic Inequality Is Not an Act of God

“Inequality” is out as a White House talking point, The Washington Post reported on July 4. “Opportunity” is in. This is a problem. It’s just wrongheaded to believe that we face a binary choice: reform an unequal system or help the middle class.

By implying that there is a disconnect between inequality and opportunity, (many, not all) Democrats ignore the fact that opportunity cannot be provided as long as the economic and financial system is so unequal. Some, like Senator Elizabeth Warren, intuitively understand this. After all, she first came to Washington to battle a system that has long been rigged against the middle class, where working families’ voices get overpowered by well-funded lobbyists who hold elected officials by the pocket. By creating an artificial division between inequality and opportunity, we turn a blind eye to this rampant unfairness that helped the 1 percent ascend to their economic perches in the first place.

Michelle Chen: Why the Supreme Court’s Attack on Labor Hurts Women Most

The War on Women found an ally at the Supreme Court last week with two rulings that threaten to deepen gender inequality in the workplace. The Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case is more clearly aimed at women, with its religiously inspired assault on women’s contraceptive healthcare access. But it was the ruling on union rights in Harris v. Quinn, which threatens a vital union for public healthcare workers, that may prove even more consequential for the lives of working women.

Washington has for years been paralyzed by the right’s anti-abortion agenda and resistant to funding the most basic welfare supports for low-income mothers. Now the Court has expanded the attack on women through legal clampdowns on women’s economic and civil rights-attacking reproductive healthcare in one ruling and gutting women’s labor power in the other.

Bryce Covert: What Happened When One Country Required All Corporate Boards to Be 40% Women

Call it the Sheryl Sandberg theory of feminist progress: help more women get into the tippy top of the company pyramid and change will spread to the bottom ranks. You could also call it trickle-down feminism: focus on equality at the top and the rewards will flow downward. There are some real life examples that show this doesn’t always pan out. Take Marissa Mayer reducing flexible scheduling after she became the first female CEO at Yahoo, or Sandberg herself, who didn’t realize pregnant women needed reserved parking lots close to the building until she was pregnant.

But a new study quantifies (pdf) just how far the effects of putting women in leadership can, and can’t, go. Marianne Bertrand, Sandra E. Black and Sissel Jensen examined what happened after Norway instituted a quota in 2003 that required public companies to make their boards at least 40 percent female. The quota did get many more women onto corporate boards, and it may have helped boost their pay, as the wage gap between male and female board members fell.

Ana Marie Cox: The real reason gun control is failing

Americans are still OK with guns, and until we can change that, Michael Bloomberg’s millions won’t mean a thing

The Michael Bloomberg – funded Everytown for Gun Safety announced on Monday a new gambit for creating pressure on candidates to move, finally, in the direction of stricter gun laws: the group will offer them a survey. Everytown – one of Several sane competitors playing the long game against the National Rifle Association’s stranglehold on violence in America – will make politicians put their positions on firearm restrictions, however convoluted, on the record. As the head of the organization, which has $50m in Bloomberg backing to the NRA’s untold millions, pronounced: “Now we’re going toe-to-toe with the gun lobby.”

This has the feel of a good idea, because it is one – one already employed, simply to opposite effect, by the NRA itself. Everytown isn’t offering a counterweight to the NRA’s rating system, it is duplicating it … just without the grades. What information could an anti-gun voter would find in the Everytown questionnaire that the NRA hasn’t ferreted out itself? It will tell you who to vote for as surely as a National Right-to-Life rating will direct a voter concerned about preserving the right to choose.

Jessica Valenti: Women like sex. Stop making ‘health’ excuses for why we use birth control

When 99% of the female population uses contraception, it’s sad that we can’t just come out and say that we use it for sex. And that we like the sex – a lot

Women like to have sex. Some women who like to have sex don’t want to get pregnant, so they use birth control. I understand that these are not particularly revelatory statements, but for some incredibly irritating reason, the punditocracy is still dwelling on the fairly mundane facts that sex happens and contraception is often a part of it.

Conservatives won’t admit their deep-seated fear of non-reproductive sex, so Washington media’s machine is propping it up for them. But if this is our mid-summer debate, well, let’s at least try to find a reason for the stupidity, shall we?

When Sandra Fluke gave her now infamous testimony before the US House of Representatives about insurance coverage for contraception, the bulk of her opening statement focused on a friend who needed to take birth control to treat polycystic ovarian syndrome. In the wake of last week’s supreme court decision on Hobby Lobby, Elle magazine ran a piece on “10 Medical Reasons Why a Woman Might Be Prescribed Birth Control”. And then the National Journal published a widely shared article declaring that what “everyone is missing” in the ongoing Hobby Lobby debate is all the women who need to take birth control for medical reasons. “Even if these women never have sex once in their lives, they need to be on birth control,” wrote reporter Lucia Graves.

Zoë Carpenter: If Christian Corporations Have Religious Rights, What About Muslim Prisoners?

If corporations have religious rights that warrant protection under the law, why don’t men imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay?

A federal judge has given the US government until Tuesday evening to answer that question, which was posed by lawyers representing two Guantánamo detainees, Emad Hassan and Ahmed Rabbani, who have been held without charge or trial. Authorities at the prison have barred the two men from communal prayers during the holy month of Ramadan because they are on hunger strike. Two courts ruled previously that Hassan and Rabbani are not people, at least “within the scope” of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which prevents the government from substantially burdening a person’s freedom to exercise religion.

In last week’s Hobby Lobby v. Burwell decision, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court ruled that the chain of craft stores, along with other closely held corporations, are within the scope of the RFRA. Three days later, lawyers representing the detainees filed new lawsuits calling on a DC circuit court to restore the detainees’ right to communal prayers in light of the High Court’s interpretation.

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

New York Times Editorial Board: Germany and the Minimum Wage

The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is obviously too low. So is the Democrats’ proposed increase to $10.10 an hour by 2016. If the minimum wage had merely kept pace over time with inflation, average wages or productivity growth, it would be between $11 an hour and $18 an hour today.

It would also be higher if it kept pace with what other advanced economies are prepared to pay.

Last week, the lower house of Parliament in Germany voted to set a nationwide minimum wage of 8.50 euros an hour, about $11.60, effective in 2015. The upper house is expected to approve the measure this week. [..]

In a global economy that has long relied on low wages to lift profits, a relatively high minimum wage in Germany would also reflect a growing consensus there that a high-wage, high-productivity economy is, in fact, an advantage in stabilizing the nation economically and socially.

Malte Spitz: The NSA, the silent chancellor, and the double agent: how German ignorance left us vulnerable to the US spy game

To credibly demand change from the Americans, Merkel’s government must come clean about its own mass surveillance

The German-American relationship has long been like a bad, never-ending break-up. Germany, especially under the conservative leadership of Chancellor Angela Merkel, saw the love of its life – intimate, trustworthy, for better or for worse, with no secrets but plenty of denial. The US was always a more sober and suspicious lover – in it for the affair, whenever it had the free time.

Now that a German intelligence official has been arrested under suspicion of passing secret information back to America – potentially concerning an NSA investigation, and reportedly under direction by the CIA – finally the Merkel government is admitting that the long honeymoon is over. Tap my cellphone, shame on you; fool me with a double agent, shame on an ignorant nation.

If a young employee of the German foreign intelligence agency (BND) was indeed passing secret information to the Americans for more than two years, that is certainly a direct attack to the heart of Merkel’s conservatives – no matter how low-level the employee, and especially if he was spying on the German Bundestag’s spying investigation. The security apparatus was always their domain, and an invasion of their system would be a blow to their fight for enhancing surveillance inside and outside of Germany

Robert Sheer: Hillary Clinton Flaunts Her Surveillance State Baggage

Who is the true patriot, Hillary Clinton or Edward Snowden? The question comes up because Clinton has gone all out in attacking Snowden as a means of burnishing her hawkish credentials, eliciting Glenn Greenwald’s comment that she is “like a neocon, practically.”

On Friday in England, Clinton boasted that two years ago she had favored a proposal by a top British General to train 100,000 “moderate” rebels to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria, but Obama had turned her down. The American Thatcher? In that same interview with the Guardian she also managed to get in yet another shot against Snowden for taking refuge in Russia “apparently under Putin’s protection,” unless, she taunted, “he wishes to return knowing he would be held accountable.”

Accountable for telling the truth that Clinton concealed during her tenure as secretary of state in the Obama administration? Did she approve of the systematic spying on the American people as well as of others around the world, including the leaders of Germany and Brazil, or did she first learn of all this from the Snowden revelations?

Dean Baker: The Good News About Obamacare in the June Jobs Report

Many people touted the 288,000 new jobs the Labor Department reported for June, along with the drop in the unemployment rate to 6.1 percent, as good news. And they were right. For now it appears the economy is creating jobs at a decent pace. We still have a long way to go to get back to full employment, but at least we are now finally moving forward at a faster pace.

However there is another important part of the jobs picture that was largely overlooked. There was a big jump in the number of people who report voluntarily working part-time. This figure is now 830,000 (4.4 percent) above its year ago level.

Before explaining the connection to the Obamacare, it is worth making an important distinction. Many people who work part-time jobs actually want full-time jobs. They take part-time work because this is all they can get. An increase in involuntary part-time work is evidence of weakness in the labor market and it means that many people will be having a very hard time making ends meet.

Richard Seymour: Ahmad Chalabi: the pariah who could become Iraq’s next prime minister

Even for the Bush administration, Chalabi was too untrustworthy. That the White House now needs him is a sign of its despair

If any confirmation were needed of the disintegration of Iraq and the failure of US policy, then surely it must be the second coming of Ahmad Chalabi. Once persona non grata in the US embassy in Iraq, he has been welcomed back into the fold, cited in the New York Times as a serious contender to replace Nouri al-Maliki, endorsed by Paul Wolfowitz, and talked up as a saviour by sections of the Iraqi government.

The US wants a replacement for Maliki, but why Chalabi, who has negligible grassroots support in Iraq? He is said to be able to unite the different factions, but has any figure done more to play off one against the other? The answer comes down to Chalabi’s considerable skill in elite manoeuvring. Never particularly interested in or adept at mass politics, he is exceptional at twisting arms and wooing behind the scenes.

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