Tag: Opinion

Dodging taxes and regulation isn’t just disruptive – it’s bad for the economy

The “sharing economy” – typified by companies like Airbnb or Uber, both of which now have market capitalizations in the billions – is the latest fashion craze among business writers. But in their exuberance over the next big thing, many boosters have overlooked the reality that this new business model is largely based on evading regulations and breaking the law.

For the uninitiated, Airbnb is an internet-based service that allows people to rent out spare rooms to strangers for short stays. Uber is an internet taxi service that allows tens of thousands of people to answer ride requests with their own cars. There are hundreds of other such services that involve the renting or selling of everything from power tools to used suits and wedding dresses.

George Zornick: Congress Could Slow Obama’s Push for a Longer Afghan War

President Obama announced Tuesday afternoon that 9,800 American troops will remain in Afghanistan after 2014, a number that he said could be cut in half by the start of 2015. By the end of 2016, the last year of his presidency, Obama envisions a final end to America’s longest war.

The decision to drag out the war for two and half more years is an almost total surrender to many Pentagon officials who were pushing the president for around 10,000 troops to remain in the country; NBC News’s Jim Miklaszewski reported it was “exactly” what General Joseph Dunford, the top American commander in Afghanistan, had requested. [..]

But Obama still faces resistance to his desire for more war in Afghanistan-now, from Congress. The Nation has learned that there will be a push in the Senate to request a congressional vote on any troop presence in Afghanistan past 2014. It will come in the form of a proposed amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which just cleared the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Dave Zirin: Pure Poison: The UCSB Shooting, Ray Rice and a Culture of Violence Against Women

If a mass killing perpetrated by a deeply disturbed misogynist does not make us look at how our society promotes and perpetuates violence against women, I am not sure what will. Our culture has always looked the other way or even validated gendered violence, particularly against African-American women. Yet in an era of lightning-fast cultural transmission, this historic violence seems to be both mutating and becoming more perniciously commodified before our eyes. It’s a violence that seems to exist in its own cultural category, where it is not only excused but also treated as deeply humorous-and woe to anyone who says otherwise. It’s a violence that has become so normalized, so all encompassing, that it often feels that saying or doing nothing becomes an act of complicity.

It does not take any sort of genius to draw a line in between the weekend’s shooting, the torments faced by Marissa Alexander or other women who defend themselves, and the fact that the quickest way to invite a barrage of social media hate is to say something as simple as, “I don’t think rape jokes are funny.” These dots connect to create a gun pointed at the ability of women to possess the most elemental human right in what is supposed to be a free society: the right to be left alone.

Zoë Carpenter: Is Obama Moving the ‘War on Terror’ to Africa?

Despite talk of a pivot to Asia, the US military’s gaze has settled on Africa. That isn’t news for anyone who has followed the expansion of US Africa Command (AFRICOM) on the continent. But it’s a decisive shift that until now US officials have been loath to acknowledge.

The veil lifted slightly on Wednesday when President Obama asked Congress for $5 billion to train and equip foreign governments for counterterrorism activities. Most of the countries he cited are in northern Africa, including Somalia, Libya and Mali. US Special Operations are reportedly already training new counterterrorism units in Libya and Mali, as well as Niger and Mauritania.

I got distracted reading two pieces this morning. This great Andrew O’Hehir piece, on how those attacking Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald ought to consider the lesson of Justice Louis Brandeis’ dissent in Olmstead. [..]

And this more problematic Eben Moglen piece talking about how Snowden revealed a threat to democracy we must now respond to. [..]

I raise them in tandem here because both address the threat of spying to something called democracy. And the second piece raises it amid the context of American Empire (he compares the US to the Roman decline into slavery). [..]

One more thing. Those who believe that American power is affirmatively benign power may be inclined to think the old ways of ensuring that power – which includes a docile press – are justified. As much as journalism embraced an adversarial self-image after Watergate, the fundamentally complicit role of journalism really didn’t change for most. Thus, there remains a culture of journalism in which it was justified to tell stories to the American people – and the rest of the world – to sustain American power.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Let’s stop subsidizing economic inequality

Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, recently asked in a speech at the New Populism Conference in Washington, “Why should our tax dollars subsidize economic inequality?” Why must you and I foot the bill, via our taxes, for the callousness of Wal-Mart or Domino‘s?

The chasm between C-suite pay and minimum wage may be wider than ever before – in 2013, according to the AFL-CIO, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies made 774 times as much minimum wage workers – but, as Anderson points out, many people have grown tired of waiting for a solution to emerge from the maw of Washington and are instead taking the initiative themselves. “Just like on the minimum wage,” Anderson told the conference, “people aren’t waiting for Washington to lead on CEO pay. We’re seeing an unprecedented explosion of bold creative action outside Washington.” In Sacramento, Providence and other capitals, state-level activism and legislation are taking care of business that the House and Senate have chosen to ignore.

Hadley Freeman: Elliot Rodger was a misogynist – but is that all he was?

The killer was enabled by a culture that validates the feelings of angry, lonely and sometimes mentally unwell men

Elliot Rodger was a misogynist. This cannot really be in doubt about a young man who went out on Friday, armed with three semi-automatic shotguns he had bought legally, to punish all women for rejecting him sexually.Elliot Rodger was a misogynist. This cannot really be in doubt about a young man who went out on Friday, armed with three semi-automatic shotguns he had bought legally, to punish all women for rejecting him sexually. [..]

It is also worth pointing out that even if Rodger had been diagnosed with a serious mental illness he would still have been able to buy a gun, even in California, which has some of the most stringent laws about buying guns in the United States.

Was misogyny the reason a 22-year-old man went on a killing spree? Hell yes. Were other factors at play here, too, such as mental health, a financially straitened mental health system and an American political system cowed by the NRA, leading to too much access to guns? Yes, yes and yes. And to say that doesn’t diminish the part played by any of these reasons. In fact, they underline the dangers in one another.

Jessica Valenti: How to end the college class war

Between social networks, easy majors and rich parents, the new student elite is destined for success before they hit their first kegger. But there’s a way out – and I learned the hard way

From the time I was seven years old, there was one word my parents repeated in every grade, at every test, during any slip-up: college.

My parents didn’t go to college; they married when my mother was still a teenager, to escape poverty and less-than-stellar home lives. But they were certain that college was the gateway to the middle class for their daughters: public school plus university equals meritocracy and the American Dream. [..]

It was the most awful, culture-shocked year of my life – and I flunked out after my second semester, depressed and ashamed.

So it was hard for me reading a new bestseller in the making, Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, and not think of that year. I had never understood how I could fail so miserably at something my parents worked so hard to prepare me for. But according to authors and sociology professors Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton, my experience was disconcertingly normal.

Turns out, the college experience – what we’re told is the most obvious path to upward mobility – is actually reinforcing class inequality as much as it disrupts it.

There are good reasons the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission should block Comcast’s $45 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable. The merger will concentrate too much market power in the hands of one company, creating a telecommunications colossus the likes of which the country has not seen since 1984 when the government forced the breakup of the original AT&T telephone monopoly. [..]

By buying Time Warner Cable, Comcast would become a gatekeeper over what consumers watch, read and listen to. The company would have more power to compel Internet content companies like Netflix and Google, which owns YouTube, to pay Comcast for better access to its broadband network. Netflix, a dominant player in video streaming, has already signed such an agreement with the company. This could put start-ups and smaller companies without deep pockets at a competitive disadvantage.

Joe Nocera: What Did The Framers Really Mean?

Three days after the publication of Michael Waldman’s new book, “The Second Amendment: A Biography,” Elliot Rodger, 22, went on a killing spree, stabbing three people and then shooting another eight, killing four of them, including himself. This was only the latest mass shooting in recent memory, going back to Columbine.

In his rigorous, scholarly, but accessible book, Waldman notes such horrific events but doesn’t dwell on them. He is after something else. He wants to understand how it came to be that the Second Amendment, long assumed to mean one thing, has come to mean something else entirely. To put it another way: Why are we, as a society, willing to put up with mass shootings as the price we must pay for the right to carry a gun? [..]

The surprising discovery is that of all the amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights, the Second was probably the least debated. What we know is that the founders were deeply opposed to a standing army, which they viewed as the first step toward tyranny. Instead, their assumption was that the male citizenry would all belong to local militias. As Waldman writes, “They were not allowed to have a musket; they were required to. More than a right, being armed was a duty.”

Thus the unsurprising discovery: Virtually every reference to “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” – the second part of the Second Amendment – was in reference to military defense. Waldman notes the House debate over the Second Amendment in the summer of 1789: “Twelve congressmen joined the debate. None mentioned a private right to bear arms for self-defense, hunting or for any purpose other than joining the militia.”

Stephen W. Thrasher: States are falling for marriage equality. Which will be the last one standing?

History does not judge well the last people to end discrimination, and it’s getting more and more difficult to stop doing the right thing

States have been falling for marriage equality so fast this week it’s hard to come up with the right analogy to express the speed. How fast have they been falling – like dominoes, in a parlor game with the rather high stakes of American civil rights? Like flies, dying in a swarm over the rotting carcass of discrimination?

Or like tears dripping from the face of National Organization for Marriage President Brian Brown, whom I watched bawl his head off two years ago in the galley of the New York Senate, during the vote that made same-sex marriage legal in the Empire State? [..]

When I started writing this article, Oregon was the 17th state to fall; in the middle of my draft, Pennsylvania became the 18th – the second in less than 24 hours, and the fourth federal decision for marriage equality (rendered by judges appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents) in just the last month.

And the beat, as Cher herself would say, goes on.

Andrew Leonard: The Internet as we know it is dying

How Facebook and Google are killing the classic Internet and reinventing it in their image

It was a week of rage, nostalgia and despair on the Internet.

Sure, you could say that about any week on the Internet. But last week delivered some prime material. Check out this gamer exploding in fury at the rumor that Google – “The King Midas of Shit!” – might buy the hugely popular streaming gamer site Twitch TV. Or this sad note from the founder of the venerable “community weblog” MetaFilter explaining why a Google-precipitated decline in advertising revenue had forced him to lay off three much beloved staffers. Or this diatribe from a Facebook manager, savaging the current ]state of the media https://www.facebook.com/mhuda…

All is not well on the Web. While the particulars of each outburst of consternation and anger vary significantly, a common theme connects them all: The relentless corporatization and centralization of control over Internet discourse is obviously not serving the public interest. The good stuff gets co-opted, bought out, or is reduced to begging for spare change on the virtual street corner. The best minds of our generation have been destroyed by web metrics, dragging themselves across a vast wasteland in search of the next clickbait headline. [..]

It’s a big mess. The last two lines of the Facebook rant are “It’s hard to tell who’s to blame. But someone should fix this shit.”

That’s easier said than done.

On January 9, 2009, then President-elect Barack Obama announced, in what was to be a departure from Bush administration era “war-on-terror” tactics: “I was clear throughout this campaign and was clear throughout this transition that under my administration the United States does not torture.” In April 2014, Senator Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called Bush administration era torture programs “a stain on our history that must never be allowed to happen again.” Attorney General Eric Holder also weighed in, arguing that declassification of the Senate Intelligence Committee report would ensure that “no administration contemplates such a program in the future.”

While it is essential that the truth be revealed regarding the systematic torture of detainees under the Bush administration, it is equally essential that we recognize the claim that President Obama ended torture as the myth that it is. Under President Obama, the United States continued to imprison individuals in Afghan detention facilities fully aware of the systematic torture that takes place. The continued practice of transferring detainees to Afghan detention facilities despite full knowledge of the systematic torture being perpetrated therein is an unequivocal violation of the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

Paul Krugman: Europe’s Secret Success

I’ll be spending the next couple of days at a forum sponsored by the European Central Bank whose de facto topic – whatever it may say on the program – will be the destructive monetary muddle caused by the Continent’s premature adoption of a single currency. What makes the story even sadder is that Europe’s financial and macroeconomic woes have overshadowed its remarkable, unheralded longer-term success in an area in which it used to lag: job creation.

What? You haven’t heard about that? Well, that’s not too surprising. European economies, France in particular, get very bad press in America. Our political discourse is dominated by reverse Robin-Hoodism – the belief that economic success depends on being nice to the rich, who won’t create jobs if they are heavily taxed, and nasty to ordinary workers, who won’t accept jobs unless they have no alternative. And according to this ideology, Europe – with its high taxes and generous welfare states – does everything wrong. So Europe’s economic system must be collapsing, and a lot of reporting simply states the postulated collapse as a fact.

Jessica Valenti: Elliot Rodger’s California shooting spree: further proof that misogyny kills

Attributing the deaths of six people and wounding of several others in Isla Vista to ‘a madman’ ignores a stark truth about our society

We should know this by now, but it bears repeating: misogyny kills.

On Friday night, a man – identified by police as Elliot Rodgers – allegedly seeking “retribution” against women whom he said sexually rejected him went on a killing spree in Isla Vista, California, killing six people and sending seven more to the hospital with serious gunshot injuries. Three of the bodies were reportedly removed from Rodger’s apartment.

Before the mass murder he allegedly committed, 22-year-old Rodger – also said to have been killed Friday night – made several YouTube videos complaining that he was a virgin and that beautiful women wouldn’t pay attention to him. In one, he calmly outlined how he would “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blond slut I see”.

According to his family, Rodger was seeking psychiatric treatment. But to dismiss this as a case of a lone “madman” would be a mistake.

The sham continues.

Back in the fall of 2009, in the wake of criticism that it was failing to prosecute executives of the companies that had brought the financial system to the brink of disaster, the Justice Department established the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force. Its purpose, said Justice, was “to hold accountable those who helped bring about the last financial crisis.” It promised to “prosecute significant financial crimes, ensure just and effective punishment for those who perpetrate financial crimes, recover proceeds for victims” and so on. [..]

Now comes the Justice Department’s latest exercise in public relations: the Credit Suisse settlement that was announced earlier this week. The Swiss bank’s crime was systematically setting up, well, Swiss bank accounts, allowing Americans to evade taxes. According to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the bank had 22,000 private accounts for American customers worth as much as $12 billion as of 2006. In meting out the punishment, the Justice Department, for the first time since the financial crisis, demanded that a major financial firm plead guilty to a criminal count. That is what the headline writers highlighted – and what Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. stressed. [..]

Fourteen months ago, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Holder said that “the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them” without endangering the economy. This became known as “too big to jail.”

In attempting to use the Credit Suisse guilty plea as proof that it is tough on financial crime, Justice has done just the opposite: It has shown, yet again, that big financial firms are too big to jail.

Gail Collins: It’s No Picnic in the Senate

Happy Memorial Day Weekend! Time for summer fun! So let’s discuss Congressional gridlock.

Really, what did you expect? If you want a barbecue, go light some charcoal.

It’s been a while since we’ve talked about Congress. Do you remember when we used to complain all the time about how our legislators can’t get things done? Now we can go for weeks – months! – without even wondering what the little devils are up to. [..]

In the Senate, which is always the more interesting spot, the Republicans say they have to stall things because they’re protesting the way the majority leader, Harry Reid, bullies them around and won’t let them offer amendments.

It is definitely true that Harry Reid is not the most adorable personality on the planet. If Congress was a school, he would be the teacher nobody wants for homeroom. However, the Republicans’ complaint isn’t actually that they can’t propose any changes. They’re demanding their historic prerogative to propose changes that have nothing whatsoever to do with the subject at hand.

George Zornick: Politicizing the VA Isn’t the Answer to Scandal

The ongoing scandal into extensive problems at Veterans Affairs hospitals erupted briefly on the Senate floor Thursday, when Senator Marco Rubio asked for unanimous consent to pass a VA “accountability” bill that cleared the House by a wide margin a day earlier. Senator Bernie Sanders blocked the request, and it’s worth unpacking why.

At first blush Sanders’ objection seems unreasonable-the bill is not opposed by the White House, and got 390 votes in the House from legislators on both sides of the aisle. Only thirty-three members voted against it. So why did Sanders, with the implicit backing of Senate Democrats, object to quick passage?

The legislation, which is only three pages long, is straightforward: it gives the VA secretary the power to fire anyone in senior executive service at the department. These are the highest-ranking civilian federal employees, who normally enjoy a great deal of job protection under federal civil service rules. But this bill would give the VA secretary the power to dismiss them hastily, as the Defense secretary can do with generals, or as a CEO in the private sector could do to his or her employees.The ongoing scandal into extensive problems at Veterans Affairs hospitals erupted briefly on the Senate floor Thursday, when Senator Marco Rubio asked for unanimous consent to pass a VA “accountability” bill that cleared the House by a wide margin a day earlier. Senator Bernie Sanders blocked the request, and it’s worth unpacking why.

At first blush Sanders’ objection seems unreasonable-the bill is not opposed by the White House, and got 390 votes in the House from legislators on both sides of the aisle. Only thirty-three members voted against it. So why did Sanders, with the implicit backing of Senate Democrats, object to quick passage?

The legislation (pdf), which is only three pages long, is straightforward: it gives the VA secretary the power to fire anyone in senior executive service at the department. These are the highest-ranking civilian federal employees, who normally enjoy a great deal of job protection under federal civil service rules. But this bill would give the VA secretary the power to dismiss them hastily, as the Defense secretary can do with generals, or as a CEO in the private sector could do to his or her employees.

Eugene Robinson: GOP Still Swallowing the Tea

What’s happening in the Republican primaries is less a defeat for the tea party than a surrender by the GOP establishment, which is winning key races by accepting the tea party’s radical anti-government philosophy.

Anyone who hopes the party has finally come to its senses will be disappointed. Republicans have pragmatically decided not to concede Senate elections by nominating eccentrics and crackpots. But in convincing the party’s activist base to come along, establishment leaders have pledged fealty to eccentric, crackpot ideas. [..]

Nothing I’ve seen in the primary results so far suggests the Republican Party is tempering its views or weakening its implacable opposition to anything the Obama administration proposes. To the contrary, the GOP slate promises to display a remarkable degree of far-right ideological purity. Republican candidates simply cannot risk being called “moderate.”

Democrats can, though. The Republican Party’s move to the right opens political space for Democratic incumbents and challengers trying to win in red states. Candidates such as Grimes and Nunn can emphasize local issues while maintaining some distance from Washington-and, in the process, make Republicans play defense.

Democrats must not let voters be fooled. Yes, tea party candidates are going down. But the tea party’s extremism and obstructionism live on.

NSA defenders still won’t tell the whole truth, but a newly revealed damage assessment offers a window into government damage control – not any actual damage done by Snowden

For months, defenders of America’s spy agencies have been touting a classified Pentagon report as proof that Edward Snowden’s unprecedented disclosures have grievously harmed intelligence operations and placed American lives at risk. But heavily redacted excerpts of that report, obtained by the Guardian under a Freedom of Information Act request and published on Thursday, suggest that those harms may be largely hypothetical – an attempt to scare spy-loving legislators with the phantoms of lost capability.

The first thing to note is that the Pentagon report does not concern the putative harm of disclosures about the National Security Agency programs that have been the focus of almost all Snowden-inspired stories published to date. Rather, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s damage assessment deals only with the potential impact of “non-NSA Defense material” that the government believes Snowden may have obtained. Any harm resulting from the disclosure of NSA-related material – in other words, almost everything actually made public thus far – is not included in this assessment.

In fact, the unredacted portions of the report don’t discuss published material at all. Instead, the Pentagon was assessing the significance of the information “compromised” by Snowden – all the documents they believe he copied, whether or not they ever see the light of day.

Andrea J. Prasow: The year of living more dangerously: Obama’s drone speech was a sham

We were promised drone memos. And a case for legal targeted killing. And no more Gitmo. We’re still waiting

A lot can happen in a year. And a lot can’t.

Twelve months ago today, Barack Obama gave a landmark national security speech in which he frankly acknowledged that the United States had at least in some cases compromised its values in the years since 9/11 – and offered his vision of a US national security policy more directly in line with “the freedoms and ideals that we defend.” It was widely praised as “a momentous turning point in post-9/11 America“.

Addressing an audience at the National Defense University (NDU) in Washington, the president pledged greater transparency about targeted killings, rededicated himself to closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay and urged Congress to refine and ultimately repeal the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which has been invoked to justify everything from military detention to drones strikes.

A year later, none of these promises have been met. Instead, drone strikes have continue (and likely killed and wounded civilians), 154 men remain detained at Guantanamo and the administration has taken no steps to roll back the AUMF. This is not the sort of change Obama promised.

Jessica Valenti: You can’t cut open pregnant women because you disagree with their choices

The same thinking behind ‘personhood’ arguments is being used to force pregnant women to have surgery against their will

Having a doctor perform surgery on you without permission – literally cutting into you while you protest – is the stuff of which horror movies are made. Yet that’s just what happened to 35-year-old Rinat Dray when a doctor at Staten Island University Hospital performed a C-section on the Brooklyn mother, against her will and verbal protests.

Her right to bodily integrity and freedom was taken away with a swipe of a pen – the director of maternal and fetal medicine, Dr James J Ducey, wrote in Dray’s medical records, “I have decided to override her refusal to have a C-section.” Dray is suing the hospital and doctors for malpractice.

It sounds like a no-brainer – you can’t force someone to have surgery. But thanks to American policy that trumps “fetal rights” over women’s personhood, Dray’s case may not be as clear cut as it seems.

David Lidington: We should trust Ukrainians to make the right choice in Sunday’s elections

Ukraine is trying to find democratic solutions to the challenges it faces, and the international community must give it time to do so

Trust in the ability of people to make decisions about their own future is a fundamental tenet of democracy. On Sunday, the citizens of Ukraine go to the polls to elect a new president in one of the most important elections of their history. Every voter in Ukraine should have their say on the future they want for their country. And as our foreign secretary, William Hague, said in his video message to Ukrainian voters this morning, they have the UK’s strong support.

I am encouraged that polling is set to take place in more than 90% of the polling districts across Ukraine except Crimea, and is likely to be unhindered in the majority of the country’s 25 regions. It is also good news that the Ukrainian parliament is making special arrangements for those who live in Crimea to vote.

The Senate is unnecessarily rushing to vote on President Obama’s nomination of David Barron for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston, even though the public has yet to see documents written by Mr. Barron that have raised legitimate concern among civil liberties advocates on both the left and the right.

Mr. Barron, a Harvard law professor, was a top official in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel when he wrote two classified memos justifying the drone strike in Yemen in 2011 that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen accused of being a terrorist. [..]

In other respects, Mr. Barron appears clearly qualified for the job. Some senators will vote for him in spite of (or because of) what is in the memos; some, like Mr. Paul, will vote against him. But what’s the rush in pushing through this vote? A federal judgeship is a lifetime appointment. The American people should be able to decide for themselves whether their elected representatives are making the right decision.

Jane Hamsher: The Price of Whistleblowing: Manning, Greenwald, Assange, Kiriakou and Snowden

We were eating dinner last night around my kitchen table when the news of the dustup between Wikileaks and the Intercept came through the tubes. As I read the details to the people who came here to share food and conversation, everyone’s eyebrows raised.

The eyebrows at a lot of tables probably raised as Wikileaks took the Intercept to task for its latest story, and failing to release the name of one of the countries in which the United States is spying on its citizens. The Intercept maintained they had been shown compelling evidence that led them to redact the name; Wikileaks maintained the citizens of the country have a right to know. [..]

I know that in the past, Assange has had concerns about releasing documents himself without redacting the names of innocent people who could get hurt, and has contacted the Pentagon offering to work with them to redact documents before their release. And I also understand his concerns that the Pentagon is not always acting in good faith when they say people are in danger. They have cried wolf so many times that nobody believes them any more.

But I also don’t think you can assume bad faith on the part of the people at the Intercept. We may learn two days from now, or in 10 years, that there were fierce internal battles over the Snowden documents. Or we may learn that everyone was in general agreement to redact the name of the country.  I have no idea and have had no discussions with anyone at the Intercept about the story, including Glenn Greenwald.

Robert Reich: The Practical Choice: Not American Capitalism or “Welfare State Socialism” but an Economy That’s Working for a Few or Many

For years Americans have assumed that our hard-charging capitalism  is better than the soft-hearted version found in Canada and Europe. American capitalism might be a bit crueler but it generates faster growth and higher living standards overall. Canada’s and Europe’s “welfare-state socialism” is doomed.  

It was a questionable assumption to begin with, relying to some extent on our collective amnesia about the first three decades after World War II, when tax rates on top incomes in the U.S. never fell below 70 percent, a larger portion of our economy was invested in education than before or since, over a third of our private-sector workers were unionized, we came up with Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor, and built the biggest infrastructure project in history, known as the interstate highway system.

But then came America’s big U-turn, when we deregulated, de-unionized, lowered taxes on the top, ended welfare, and stopped investing as much of the economy in education and infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Canada and Europe continued on as before. Soviet communism went bust, and many of us assumed European and Canadian “socialism” would as well.

That’s why recent data from the Luxembourg Income Study Database  is so shocking.

The top Senate Republican beat his conservative primary opponent, but it came at a price for the GOP

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s primary victory on Tuesday night in Kentucky will undoubtedly tempt many a pundit to write the Tea Party’s eulogy. But the Tea Party will achieve in electoral death what it could never achieve in life: lasting control of the GOP agenda.

McConnell won because he’s got a familiar name, a lot of money and the kind of political clout that makes up for occasional lapses from orthodoxy. That might not be enough next time – as a local Kentucky Republican leader told the National Journal last week, the state party is “still McConnell’s Republican Party, but it’s edging toward being Rand Paul]’s Republican Party”. But, it was enough to keep it from being challenger Matt Bevin’s Republican party – especially after his [unforced errors and willingness to prize ideological purity over more pragmatic concerns (like the $2bn in pork McConnell brought home for agreeing to end the government shutdown).

McConnell didn’t win because he became a Tea Party member – he’s so conservative, he didn’t have to. (A vote analysis casts him as one of the top 25 conservative members of the Senate, and Tea Party darling and intrastate rival Paul is at number 19.) Instead, McConnell’s win just shows how easily the GOP grows over its fringes.

Zoë Carpenter: Will GOP Leaders Block Another Immigration Measure?

For months now Republican leaders have said they’re committed to passing immigration reform while making excuses for inaction. This week, the House has a chance to tackle one small part of a reform agenda, in the form of a bill to allow undocumented immigrants to serve in the military and in some cases receive green cards. WIth the window of opportunity for reform closing, the GOP leadership is poised once again to back away from it, in deference to the far right.

The Enlist Act, put forward by California Republican Jeff Denham and co-sponsored by twenty-four Republicans and twenty-six Democrats, should be among the most palatable to Republicans of the individual reforms: It rewards military service and would apply only to those who were brought to the US as children. But hard right groups like Heritage Action have fought the proposal because it would open up a pathway to legal status. Last week a spokesperson for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said he would not allow debate on the measure, dealing what seemed like a terminal blow.

Bryce Covert: In the Real World, the So-Called ‘Boy Crisis’ Disappears

The realization came to me later than it should have: getting a job is not the same as applying to college. After I graduated, I assumed for a long time that the work world operated the same way as the school world. If I wanted a job, I would comb through hundreds upon hundreds of job postings. If there were jobs that sounded interesting and I seemed to have the right qualifications, I would send in a cover letter and resume, then wait for a call to come in for an interview. About 98 percent of the time, a call never came.

Little did I know that by the time a company posts a job listing, in particular a journalism job, it’s often already all but filled and the posting is an HR formality. The people getting the jobs weren’t following the instructions as laid out on the “Work for Us” section of companies’ websites. They were having informal meetings with friends of friends.

School was all about following the directions and reaping the rewards. Getting ahead outside of school, I eventually figured out, meant figuring out rules that weren’t written down.

Michelle Chen: Turkey’s Deadly Mining Disaster Reveals Just How Little Was Done to Prevent It

After days of pulling bodies from the ruptured earth, the death toll of the Turkish mine disaster in Soma has plateaued at 301. With their masked faces frozen in agony, their crumpled photographs clutched in the fists of loved ones, the workers and their struggles have become far more visible in death than they were in life.

The names have been accounted for, but not the catastrophe that befell them. What was originally suspected to be an electrical fire was later described by experts as a massive industrial explosion precipitated by long-term negligence, not a mere technical malfunction.

Whatever the exact cause, the government seems committed to avoiding blame. Defying workers’ accounts of horrific safety conditions, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stoked outrage by coldly citing mining accidents of nineteenth-century England and suggesting that such tragedies were “usual.” The mine operator, Soma Holding, claimed the company was not obligated to provide workers with an emergency shelter, insinuating that workers were personally responsible for failing to escape on their own. (According to Today’s Zaman, Turkey is one of just a few countries without such a shelter requirement.)

For the first time, the founder of an encrypted email startup that was supposed to insure privacy for all reveals how the FBI and the US legal system made sure we don’t have the right to much privacy in the first place

My legal saga started last summer with a knock at the door, behind which stood two federal agents ready to to serve me with a court order requiring the installation of surveillance equipment on my company’s network. [..]

The problem here is technological: until any communication has been decrypted and the contents parsed, it is currently impossible for a surveillance device to determine which network connections belong to any given suspect. The government argued that, since the “inspection” of the data was to be carried out by a machine, they were exempt from the normal search-and-seizure protections of the Fourth Amendment.

More importantly for my case, the prosecution also argued that my users had no expectation of privacy, even though the service I provided – encryption – is designed for users’ privacy.

If my experience serves any purpose, it is to illustrate what most already know: courts must not be allowed to consider matters of great importance under the shroud of secrecy, lest we find ourselves summarily deprived of meaningful due process. If we allow our government to continue operating in secret, it is only a matter of time before you or a loved one find yourself in a position like I did – standing in a secret courtroom, alone, and without any of the meaningful protections that were always supposed to be the people’s defense against an abuse of the state’s power.

Gary Younge: Racism is far more than old white men using the N-word

Why is there outrage only when epithets are caught on tape? Discrimination is in reality carried out by well-mannered people

Let’s hear it for Robert Copeland. The police commissioner of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire (population 6,083) sticks to his principles. Even if those principles are stuck in a previous century and mired in bigotry. In March Jane O’Toole was finishing her dinner at a bistro in town when she heard Copeland, 82, announce loudly that he hated watching television because every time he turned on the TV he kept seeing “that fucking nigger”. The “nigger” in question was the president of the United States. [..]

By the time Copeland’s outburst became a matter of national note a week later, the pattern had been set: old white men with mouths writing cheques their status won’t cash, in currencies that went out of date decades ago. So far so bad. None are worthy of sympathy.

And yet the magnitude of the response to each incident exemplifies how high the bar is now set for challenging racist behaviour and how distorted our understanding has become of what that behaviour constitutes.

Chris Arnade: Transgender Latinas’ stories reveal how much intolerance they still endure

Facing poverty and with no support network, some Latina transwomen turn to the streets to survive

In downtown Manhattan same sex marriages have become beautifully normal. No longer are they celebrated for their rarity, they are simply celebrated as any wedding is: in whatever manner the couple wants.

Go only five or 10 miles away, to the poorer parts of New York City, and things are dramatically different.

In these communities many LGBT people face an abusive environment. Getting married to someone of the same sex is almost unimaginable. Instead, the LGBT community is still fighting a more primary battle – for basic acceptance of their identities, and to convince their families and friends to let them remain a part of their communities.

One of those neighborhoods is Jackson Heights, a mostly Latino working-class community in Queens where I have spent time documenting a portion of the trans community.

Jonathan Freedalnd: Hillary Clinton needs Hollywood: Modern Family proves it

Drama, like satire, can shape politics and alter society. From 24 to Borgen, TV does more than reflect life: it changes it

Hillary Clinton should steer well clear of Nicole Kidman. The latter’s performance in a new movie of the life of Princess Grace, formerly Grace Kelly, has come in for some acid criticism. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw declared Grace “so awe-inspiringly wooden that it is basically a fire-risk”.

Twisting the knife, he likened it to the dire Diana movie, a film whose arteries were similarly clogged with saccharine. Admittedly, Helen Mirren did a wonderful PR job for the Queen, but often even the most hagiographic screen treatments can end up diminishing rather than dignifying their subjects.

What’s this got to do with the former secretary of state and could-be presidential candidate for 2016? No producer is likely to begin shooting Hillary: the Movie anytime soon – not now, when the final reel of the story is still undecided. And yet, Ms Clinton needs Hollywood’s help.

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