Tag: Opinion

It’s easy to fall into despair, to have the dark thoughts come unbidden and unwelcome. You probably know the thoughts I mean: The battle’s over. Democracy lost. The big-money interests always win. There’s no point in even trying anymore.

Why shouldn’t we feel that way? On issue after issue the public’s will is being thwarted, sometimes by leaders of both parties acting in the name of “bipartisanship.”  The message has gone out to the young, to minorities, the poor, to all the troubled and idealistic citizens of the United States: Don’t hope for too much. You’ll get what the Corporate State wants you to get and nothing more.

Americans across the political spectrum, from left to right, want a new relationship with government. They want to rebuild democracy, unimpeded by big-money influence. But how?

It starts with a manifesto, a call to action that can rally a people. Fortunately, we have a very good template to work from.

John Nichols: Tom Paine, Nelson Mandela and ‘the Birth of a New World’

During the decades of his imprisonment by South Africa’s apartheid regime, Nelson Mandela read widely and deeply from the historical and philosophical texts of the ages.

Mandela sampled from the global canon. Yet he took a special interest in the record of American revolt against empire

The events of July 4, 1776, have across the long arc of history captured the imaginations of men and women who would build nations far beyond the borders of the United States. And that was certainly the case with Mandela. When I covered him on his 1990 tour of the United States and during his 1994 campaign for the presidency of South Africa, it quickly became clear that Mandela had developed a rich understanding of the revolutionary history of the United States — and of the individuals and ideas that shaped it.

Michael Cohen: Just how low can the Republican party go?

The GOP has become the heartless party of cutting food aid to the poor, abortion bans and denying people health coverage

What is the single most consequential political development of the past five years? Some might say the election (and re-election) of Barack Obama; others might point to the passage of the most important piece of social policy (Obamacare) since the 1960s; some might even say the drawing down of US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in reality, it is the rapid descent of the Republican party into madness.

Never before in American history have we seen a political party so completely dominated and controlled by its extremist wing; and never before have we seen a political party that brings together the attributes of nihilism, heartlessness, radicalism and naked partisanship quite like the modern GOP. In a two-party system like America’s, the result is unprecedented dysfunction.

Ira Chernus: Who Says Conservatives Are More Patriotic?

As we got busy preparing for 4th of July festivities, this question popped into my head: Are conservatives more patriotic than other Americans? If you were a foreigner spending some time in the USA, getting news from the mass media and just talking to people, you might easily get that impression-especially around the 4th, when conservatives seem to be the ones most likely to display those big American flags.

In fact you might easily get that impression on any day of the year, when conservatives seem to be the ones most likely to put their love of country on display in all sorts of ways, aiming to leave no doubt in anyone’s mind about their patriotism.

But what’s the truth behind the display? Are conservatives really more patriotic than others? Well, it depends on what you mean by patriotism.

In 1792, James Madison published a little dialogue between a “Republican” and an “Anti-republican” entitled “Who Are the Best Keepers of the People’s Liberties?” defending the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

In this playlet, the “Republican”-clearly Madison himself-is a proponent of Liberty. His answer is unequivocal: “The people themselves. The sacred trust can be no where so safe as in the hands most interested in preserving it.

The “Anti-republican” opponent, an advocate of Order, replies: “The people are stupid, suspicious, licentious. They cannot safely trust themselves. When they have established government they should think of nothing but obedience, leaving the care of their liberties to their wiser rulers. [..]

In the past twenty years we have seen “message control in our media displace dissenting views on war, terrorism, foreign policy, the environment, education and drugs. We have seen privatization and deregulation empower multinational corporations selling oil, weapons, drugs and natural resources. We have seen the prophets of Order decree that national security demands the suspension of rights of due process.

Bryce Covert: How America Makes Having a Baby a Nearly Impossible Expense

Americans pay far more for maternity care and delivery than our peers in the developed world, as described in a lengthy article The New York Times published yesterday. But while the stories of the women in the piece end with delivered babies and enormous bills, the costs of having a child in this country continue after the hospital. All along the way, this country has made the cost of having children nearly prohibitive.

The costs of pregnancy have spiraled out of control in the United States. Charges for delivery have nearly tripled since 1996. Out-of-pocket costs have risen fourfold. The total price tag for a pregnancy and newborn care with a vaginal delivery is about $30,000, while it comes to $50,000 for a C-section. Women with insurance pay an average of $3,400 out of pocket, a large sum as it is. Yet over 60 percent of women with private plans that aren’t through their employers lack maternity coverage. Not to mention that nearly one in five women between the ages of 18 and 64 are uninsured. As one woman paying for private insurance told the Times, “I know that a C-section could ruin us financially.”

Medea Benjamin: How You [and President Obama] Can Close Guantanamo Prison

Yesterday, July 1, marked the first day in office for Clifford Sloan, newly appointed Guantanamo closure envoy. Shortly after his May address on counterterrorism, President Obama appointed Sloan to the Office of Guantanamo Closure in the State Department, a position that had been vacant since January. The appointment and reopening of the office is the only concrete step the President has taken concerning Guantanamo since his May speech. With over 100 of the 166 remaining prisoners on a hunger strike and over 40 being brutally force-fed, great hopes are being placed on Mr. Sloan to break the impasse.

A key first step in closing Guantanamo is releasing the 86 prisoners who have already been cleared for release. This is something the President can do by invoking the waiver system that Congress put in place. The Secretary of Defense must determine that risk of the detainees returning to militant groups is low and that the transfer is in the interest of national security, then notify Congress of the release 30 days in advance. So far, the Obama administration has never exercised this authority.

Cecile Richards: Dispatch from Austin

The Texas Legislature is back at the Capitol today, trying to pass a bill that would wipe out access to safe and legal abortion for millions of women in the state. [..]

Governor Perry and his allies couldn’t pass these dangerous restrictions during the regular session. And even after they bent every rule, silenced the very constituents whose lives would be affected by the bill, and voted in the middle of the night when they hoped no one was watching — they couldn’t do it on take two. The entire country saw how that ended: with Texas Senator Wendy Davis on her feet, hundreds of thousands of people on the edge of their seats, and the rest of us cheering like crazy in the Capitol rotunda.

So Governor Perry decided that if at first you don’t succeed — and if on the second try, you still don’t succeed — just cross your fingers and hope no one will notice that you’re going for a hat trick.

Unfortunately for Governor Perry — we noticed.

Those who tell us to trust the US’s secret, privatised surveillance schemes should recall the criminality of J Edgar Hoover’s FBI

It’s a fine thing to see mainstream American media outlets finally sparing some of their attention toward the cyber-industrial complex – that unprecedented conglomeration of state, military and corporate interests that together exercise growing power over the flow of information. It would be even more heartening if so many of the nation’s most influential voices, from senator to pundits, were not clearly intent on killing off even this belated scrutiny into the invisible empire that so thoroughly scrutinizes us – at our own expense and to unknown ends.

Summing up the position of those who worry less over secret government powers than they do over the whistleblowers who reveal such things, we have New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who argues that we can trust small cadres of unaccountable spies with broad powers over our communications. We must all wish Friedman luck with this prediction. Other proclamations of his – including that Vladimir Putin would bring transparency and liberal democracy to Russia, and that the Chinese regime would not seek to limit its citizens’ free access to the internet – have not aged especially well.

Jim Hightower: A Raw Deal From TransCanada and the Texas Railroad Commission

Texans like Julia Trigg Crawford are rebelling against a toxic combo of ignorance and arrogance.

Arrogance is an unpleasant trait. When overlaid with ignorance, it really gets ugly.

Meet Arrogance: TransCanada Corporation. The Calgary-based $1.3 billion pipeline giant  is now demanding a U.S. permit to run its Keystone XL pipeline right down our country’s center to move toxic tar sands sludge some 1,700 miles from northern Canada to export facilities on the Texas Gulf Coast. [..]

Now, meet Ignorance: The Texas Railroad Commission. This state agency is already infamous for a tail-wagging acceptance of any scam put forth by the corporations it’s supposed to regulate. Texas law meekly hands the public’s power of eminent domain to certain pipeline companies, allowing them to grab people’s land, usually at a low-ball price.

To get this extraordinary power, however, the grabsters must be “common carriers,” meaning their pipelines are essentially public, available to all users. TransCanada’s line, however, exists solely for its own private gain. Clearly, it’s not qualified to use eminent domain.

Juan Cole: How Egypt’s Michele Bachmann Became President and Plunged the Country Into Chaos

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi may or may not survive Sunday’s massive protests, organized by the youth Rebellion (Tamarrud) Movement. They are, nevertheless, a milestone in modern Egyptian history and a warning to him about his arrogant and highhanded style of governing from his fundamentalist base. Morsi, from the Muslim Brotherhood, represents the equivalent of the American tea party in Egyptian politics-captive to the religious right, invested in austerity and smaller government, and contemptuous of workers and the political left. In his first year in office, the nation’s first freely elected head of state has squandered Egyptians’ willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt. He has acted like the president of the somewhat cultish Muslim Brotherhood, rather than like the president of the whole country. Here are the major errors he has made, which have polarized Egypt and created a severe crisis that some observers worry could turn into a civil war.

Cora Currier: Child’s Death in Drone Strike Tests Obama’s Transparency Pledge

On June 9, a U.S. drone fired on a vehicle in a remote province of Yemen and killed several militants, according to media reports.

It soon emerged that among those who died was a boy – 10-year-old Abdulaziz, whose elder brother, Saleh Hassan Huraydan, was believed to be the target of the strike. A McClatchy reporter recently confirmed the child’s death with locals. [..]

It’s the first prominent allegation of a civilian death since President Obama pledged in a major speech in May “to facilitate transparency and debate” about the U.S. war on al Qaida-linked militants beyond Afghanistan. He also said “there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured” in a strike.

So what does the administration have to say in response to evidence that a child was killed?

Nothing.

Harry J. Enten: [Same-sex marriage and the south]

Without a further supreme court ruling or federal intervention, Republican state legislatures will block gay marriage for decades

America loves to talk about its democracy – except for when we don’t like its outcomes. The overturning of California’s Proposition 8 is a perfect example.  [..]

The fact that state legislatures will be required to act changes the entire equation for the south. All the southern legislatures with a constitutional ban against gay marriage also feature Republican control of at least one house of the state legislature. In most cases, Republicans control both houses with plenty of room to spare and no sign that control is going to switch anytime soon. All of the states that require going to the legislature demand super-majorities (60%+) and/or at least two consecutively elected legislatures to approve an amendment for it to reach the popular ballot.

What this basically means is the same-sex marriage debate is not even about what the majority of the people thinks in most of these states. Republican legislators control the action. That’s the whole game.

President Obama’s new regulatory agenda on climate change will face inevitable legal and political challenges. But in all fields – not just energy and the environment but health, safety and labor – one of the most formidable obstacles to reform has been the administration’s own resistance to finalizing new rules, even when it has expressed support for the causes those rules would address. [..]

The backlog has more to do with politics than economics. In 2012, a presidential election year in which Republicans hammered the administration for its allegedly “job killing” regulations, the number of rules receiving final approval hit a historic low (in data going back to 1993), while the time OIRA took to vet proposals hit new highs.

Even though Mr. Obama won, delays persist. It is as if the White House were still driven by election-year motives: defuse Republican taunts and placate industry. Or worse, its commitment to new rules is suspect.

Glen Ford: The Obamas Do Africa

he President and his family are spending a week in sub-Saharan Africa, with Senegal, Tanzania and South Africa on the itinerary. The focus of the trip, if you believe the White House, is trade, an arena in which the United States has been eclipsed by China since 2009. China, by some measurements, now does nearly twice as much business with Africa as the U.S., and the gap is growing. It is now commonly accepted that the Chinese offer far better terms of trade and investment than the Americans, that they create more jobs for Africans, and their investments leave behind infrastructure that can enrich their African trading partners in the long haul.

No one expects Obama to offer anything on this trip that will reverse America’s declining share of the African market. That’s because the U.S. is not in the business of fair and mutually beneficial trade – it’s about the business of imperialism, which is another matter, entirely. The Americans ensure their access to African natural resources through the barrel of a gun.

Robert Kuttner: Why Voter Suppression Will Backfire

Ever since the election of George W. Bush, the Republican strategy has been to keep a growing Democratic majority at bay by repressing the votes of people and groups likely to vote Democratic. [..]

With Hispanics and Asians as the fastest growing demographic groups, black turnout surpassing white turnout in some jurisdictions, and equal LGBT rights now the overwhelming majority position, the Republican Party just keeps alienating voters.

Voter suppression only underscores that reality. For two centuries, the American story has been about expansion of democracy. Today’s Republicans would narrow it, abetted by the most nakedly partisan High Court ever.

Steve Rattner: An Orphan Jackpot

ONE sure sign that federal regulations and policies are out of whack is when companies start making a business model out of gaming them. That’s particularly true in two areas of government rule making – drug regulation and corporate taxes.

Consider the success of Jazz Pharmaceuticals.

Just four years ago, this little-known company was struggling: its share price was measured in pennies, and Jazz had missed a string of interest payments on its debt. Today, its stock has levitated to $68 per share.

Jazz accomplished that $4 billion enrichment of its shareholders thanks to well-intentioned federal regulations that deterred competition for its principal product, compliant health insurers, and a Swiss-cheese corporate tax regime.

The week’s judicial work, however, leads to the question of which way the Supreme Court is looking and how the nine justices are using their enormous power, some of it unchecked even by public needs and wishes. The Tuesday decision to gut the Voting Rights Act takes the country back to some of our worst instincts: the tyranny of the majority, the oppression of minorities.

At least five of the nine claim just the opposite but are, in fact, “activist judges.” This time, in overruling history, precedent and laws, the “conservatives” decided that Congress is using old data in making sure all citizens get a fair shot at voting. That is certainly arguable, but it is a matter of public policy, not constitutional law. And public policy is the business of the public, their representatives in Congress and in the White House. A reader named Andrew Weiss wrote this to the Los Angeles Times:

“We have more proof that these nine judges are indeed partisan,” he wrote. “Whatever happened to doing the right thing? … It’s time put an end to the fantasy that the court isn’t just a nine-member legislative body.”

Mark Weisbrot: Obama retreats on Snowden

In his videotaped interview with journalist Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden said that “the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies” (like the CIA) were so formidable that “[n]o one can meaningfully oppose them. If they want to get you, they’ll get you in time.”

That remains to be seen. On Wednesday President Obama beat a hasty retreat from his global public relations and diplomatic, and political campaign against Snowden. It was quite an amazing, if implicit, admission of defeat. Here was the president of the world’s most powerful nation, with the world’s most influential media outlets having rallied to his cause, now quietly trying to lower the profile of an issue that his own government had elevated to one of the biggest stories in the world.

Ralph Nader: The Duty of Lawyers

What happens when the rule of law increasingly bows to the whims and violations of unaccountable public officials?

In the United States, we are seeing the rule of law eroded by those at the top levels of our government. We are witnessing the dismantling of the guiding principles of justice and the rule of law. Our legal system has been gamed to preferentially serve the needs of the few rather than those of the many.

The rule of law should be a persistent guard against — rather than an instrument of — unfair advantage or injustice for those with power, money and influence.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: “Believe It or Not!”13 Mindblowing Facts About America’s Tax-Dodging Corporations

A judicious writer avoids adjectives like “mindblowing,” especially when covering political or economic issues. But no other word seems to describe the stunning reality of corporate taxation in modern America, which cries out for the italics-heavy, exclamation-point-driven format made famous by Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

Stylistic overkill? Read these thirteen facts and you may change your mind. [..]

It’s all true – and there are many more astonishing facts to be found in the world of corporate taxation. To fix the economy more people will need to learn about them – and demand that they be changed.

The writer and analyst in me wants to apologize for all the italicizing and all those exclamation points. But the American citizen in me wants to shout the truth out for all the world to hear – believe it or not!

The lessons of the US whistleblower in Anne Applebaum’s Russia

First came the “shock and awe”: the revelations of massive spying by the US and British governments-on the people of the world. Then came the enlightened debate: Is Edward Snowden a hero or a traitor? Then arrived the Hollywood-style entertainment: Where is Edward Snowden going? (The Washing Post even published a map of his potential journey, as if he is some kind of an explorer trying the first ascent of Everest, or the first trek to the North Pole). Then came the finger: first from China, and then Russia. Then arrived the much-anticipated distraction-the “Obama Climate Plan.” And now, the “chill”-Russia the evil.

Mary Elizabeth Williams: The smearing of Rachel Jeantel

So why is the star witness in the George Zimmerman case being treated like a defendant?

Rachel Jeantel is a 19-year-old Florida woman. On Facebook and Twitter, she’s been known to post photos of her nails and talk about drinking. She is also the last person to have spoken with Trayvon Martin before George Zimmerman shot him to death last year, the woman who was on the phone with him when his fateful encounter unfolded. She is known in the justice system as Witness #8 in Zimmerman’s trial. She is, in fact, the prosecution’s key witness. But you’d be forgiven if you’d gotten the impression recently that she was sitting up there to defend herself.

Brittny Saunders: New York’s vote to curb stop-and-frisk is another win for civil rights

City Council made an important choice to add more oversight to NYPD policies, like stop-and-frisk, that are discriminatory

In 2011, the NYPD stopped 685,724 citizens, continuing an upward trend that began with the Bloomberg administration. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

New York City Council passed two bills designed to guarantee safety and respect for all New Yorkers. The measures were championed by Communities United for Police Reform, a broad coalition of city groups, and will strengthen the existing ban on police profiling and establish independent oversight of the city’s police department.

Today is a new day for New York City. The move reflects a growing alarm over NYPD policies and practices that violate the rights of thousands of New Yorkers and undermine police-community relationships – practices such as the discriminatory use of stop-and-frisk that waste valuable public dollars, while producing no measurable impact on public safety

Eugene Robinson: Food for Thought on Paula Deen

Paula Deen needs to give the self-pity a rest. The damage to her carefully built image is self-inflicted-nobody threw a rock-and her desperate search for approval and vindication is just making things worse.

Sorry to be so harsh, but come on. Deen is tough and savvy enough to have built a culinary empire from scratch, in the process becoming the most famous Southern cook in creation. She incarnates the whole “steel magnolia” archetype, with razor-sharp toughness beneath the flutter and the filigree.

“I is what I is,” she said in her weepy exculpation on the “Today” show.

And that’s fine. Go ahead, be what you be. Just don’t try to make everybody else responsible.

It’s amazing to watch the bully pulpit, with all the power of this president’s ability to command words, focus on the greatest crisis of our generation. I applaud the President for tackling climate change in his speech on Tuesday. It’s the most important issue we face. Reducing coal pollution, increasing energy efficiency, stimulating more renewable energy-it’s about time. Especially because Dr. Hansen and other climate scientists have shown that time is running out.

However, all the good that President Obama will do with his reductions in CO2 from power plants will be undone by his embrace of fracked gas. It is clear that he does not have the right information on fracked gas. His administration has allowed the gas industry to influence far too much of this process. In March, the President called a meeting to discuss his pending climate plan. The group of 14 energy-industry leaders-nine were CEOs of energy companies-included the head of the oil and gas giant Anadarko; Southwest Gas; Edison Electric Institute; FedEx, which pushes a switch to gas vehicles; and former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, a longtime booster of gas.

Ana Marie Cox: Wendy Davis showed Texas’ GOP boys how to filibuster and respect women

‘Unruly gals’ like Davis are responsible for nearly everything good in Texas, including stopping the latest abortion ban

Sometime around midnight last night, a female state senator in Texas stood up under the capitol dome and asked a version of the single most important question that can be asked in a democracy: “At what point does a female senator need to raise her voice to be heard over the male colleagues in the room?”

There are a lot of other versions of this question – “What do the oppressed have to do in order move the wheels of justice?” – but only one answer: Make some noise. Make a lot of noise. Noise draws scrutiny, and it is the enduring legacy of American democracy that injustice fully exposed does not stand. Yesterday’s supreme court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act illustrated that civil rights progress must be jealously guarded, but it did not invalidate the century’s worth of evidence that the arc of history bends toward justice.

Charles M. Blow: Joining Together in Justice

Proponents of equality have reason to both cheer and cry this week.

This week, in a series of rulings, the Supreme Court lay bare once more a continuing divide in this country about the role and limits of government in ensuring – or denying – equality.

In the University of Texas at Austin affirmative action case, the Voting Rights Act case and the same-sex marriage cases, the court drew a line between policies that explicitly articulate exclusion and those that implicitly and effectually remedy exclusion – both current and historical.

Proponents of racial diversity were on the losing end of those rulings, and same-sex marriage proponents were on the winning end.

Gary Younge: On the Voting Rights Act, the Color-Blind Have Been Led by the Blind

The supreme court thinks racism no longer exists at the polls. The actions of Republican legislators prove otherwise

One of the greatest cheers at an otherwise lacklustre Republican convention in Tampa last year was for Condoleeza Rice, who gave a glowing autobiographical account of her achievements in the third person. “A little girl grows up in Jim Crow Birmingham,” she said, “the segregated city of the south where her parents cannot take her to a movie theater or to restaurants, but they have convinced her that even if she cannot have a hamburger at Woolworths, she can be the president of the United States if she wanted to be, and she becomes the secretary of state.”

All mention of what it took to make such a life possible is an inconvenience. The children who were jailed, set upon by dogs and drenched by fire hoses in her home town, so that integration could become a reality, are irrelevant. The people who were killed because they registered to vote, marched against humiliation or just wouldn’t shut up when they were told to – so that a black female secretary of state was even plausible, let alone possible – do not fit. Condi made it because she worked hard. Maybe her kindergarten friend, Denise McNair, would have made it too. We’ll never know because she was bombed to death by those opposing integration while studying at Sunday school. Segregation was fickle that way.

The fact that black voters beat back modern suppression efforts in 2012 must mean they don’t need protection!

No good deed goes unpunished, I like to say. In striking down a key enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice John Roberts noted that African-American voter turnout in 2012 either exceeded or essentially matched white turnout in five of six Southern states governed by the act’s tough and controversial Section 5.

Ironically, as anyone paying attention knows, that turnout surge was driven by anger over a wave of GOP efforts to suppress black votes in those and other states – and it was helped along by Section 5, which requires states with a history of voting rights suppression to pre-clear any voting changes with the Justice Department (Justice struck down 21 such proposals since 2006). Still, despite new voter identification laws, restrictions on early voting and Sunday voting and other barriers, African-Americans voted at unprecedented rates in 2012 – and that helped give Roberts an excuse to strike down a section key to enforcing the law.

Auro Bogado: Supreme Court Strikes a Hard Blow to Tribal Sovereignty in Adoption Case

In a 5 to 4 decision today, the Supreme Court ruled that the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) does not block termination of a Native father’s parental rights. The court appears to have ruled as if it was deciding the issue based on race-when a better lens to understand the case, called Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, is through tribal sovereignty.

Ann Wright: In Yemen, Most Al Qaeda can be Captured, but Killing is Easier

Extensive interviews with families of drone victims and human rights organizations in Yemen indicate that the governments of the United States and Yemen are choosing to kill rather than attempting to capture suspected al Qaeda members in Yemen. Civilians who have no connection with Al Qaeda are killed when the U.S. uses drones to target Al Qaeda members who travel freely throughout the country. High unemployment and feelings of injustice for the killing of people in their area by drones and Yemeni air strikes provide a fertile recruiting ground for al Qaeda in Yemen. Yemen prisons in which young people have been detained and imprisoned for months and years without trial by the Government of Yemen is a key place where radicalization for armed groups, including al Qaeda, occurs.

I have been in Yemen for the past week with a CODEPINK: Women for Peace delegation that included Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans, co-founders of CODEPINK, Terry Rockefeller, whose sister was killed in 9/11 attacks and represents 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Robert Naiman, policy director of Just Foreign Policy, Pam Bailey, writer and human rights activist and Tighe Barry, CODEPINK art director. We have spoken with families of drone victims in Yemen, local and international human rights organizations based in Yemen, as well as families of prisoners in Guantanamo.

Rebecca Solnit: Welcome to the (Don’t Be) Evil Empire

Google Eats the World

Finally, journalists have started criticizing in earnest the leviathans of Silicon Valley, notably Google, now the world’s third-largest company in market value. The new round of discussion began even before the revelations that the tech giants were routinely sharing our data with the National Security Agency, or maybe merging with it. Simultaneously another set of journalists, apparently unaware that the weather has changed, is still sneering at San Francisco, my hometown, for not lying down and loving Silicon Valley’s looming presence.

The criticism of Silicon Valley is long overdue and some of the critiques are both thoughtful and scathing. The New Yorker, for example, has explored how start-ups are undermining the purpose of education at Stanford University, addressed the Valley’s messianic delusions and political meddling, and considered Apple’s massive tax avoidance.

Criminalizing investigative reporting may undermine and intimidate journalism, but it is even more devastating to democracy. Thomas Jefferson got it right when explained to John Jay that: “Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.”

Jefferson’s friend and comrade, Tom Paine argued similarly that citizens must be informed in order to be free. “A nation under a well regulated government, should permit none to remain uninstructed,” he observed in The Rights of Man. “It is monarchical and aristocratical government only that requires ignorance for its support.”

Jefferson, Paine and their contemporaries often griped about the newspapers of their day. But they recognized, correctly, that the chains of ignorance had to be broken. They supported a free and freewheeling press as an underpinning of democracy in their day. As we should in ours.

New York Times Editorial Board: A Reprieve for Affirmative Action

By a vote of 7 to 1 on Monday, the Supreme Court issued a narrow ruling about a public university’s use of race as a factor in admissions. The good news is that the court affirmed major precedents going back 35 years. It asserted that a more diverse student body – and an admission policy that helps produce one – serves a compelling interest of government by achieving educational and social benefits. Diversity, in turn, helps realize what the court has called “the dream of one nation, indivisible.”

At the same time, the court sent the case at hand – Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin – back for review by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which had upheld the university’s use of race in its admissions policy. The court did not say that race could not be used to achieve diversity. It did say, however, that the appeals court must closely reconsider the university’s admissions process to determine whether a race-neutral approach could achieve the level of diversity it seeks.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: On Too Big to Fail, All the Warning Lights Are Flashing Red (VIDEO)

“Too Big to Fail” banks played a key role in causing the last financial crisis. Since then they’ve grown even bigger, without much discouragement from the government (and in some cases with government support). Not a single executive has been prosecuted, despite their rampant lawbreaking, which means that there’s been no effective deterrent against reckless and illegal behavior.

And, with millions still unemployed and hundreds of millions still suffering the economic after-effects of the last crisis, we’re just about due for the next one.  That’s why we convened a panel at last weekend’s Netroots Nation conference titled “Stopping the Next Depression: Ending Too Big to Fail.”  And that’s why our first question was, “What would happen if the 40 million people who live in underwater American homes went on a mortgage strike?”

Norman Solomon: The Pursuit of Edward Snowden: Washington in a Rage, Striving to Run the World

Rarely has any American provoked such fury in Washington’s high places. So far, Edward Snowden has outsmarted the smartest guys in the echo chamber — and he has proceeded with the kind of moral clarity that U.S. officials seem to find unfathomable.

Bipartisan condemnations of Snowden are escalating from Capitol Hill and the Obama administration. More of the NSA’s massive surveillance program is now visible in the light of day — which is exactly what it can’t stand.

The central issue is our dire shortage of democracy. How can we have real consent of the governed when the government is entrenched with extreme secrecy, surveillance and contempt for privacy?