Tag: Opinion

My kids are into Angry Birds, a game they love for the same reason I once obsessively played Super Mario Brothers: its appeal is incomprehensible to the adults around them. This inscrutable game, however, has one essential truth: you have some pissed off birds compelled by rage to put down some zombie-looking pigs. After a sad effort to play the game myself, I had my own epiphany: this game is actually a metaphor for the city of Chicago. Please bear with me. Angry Birds is more Chicago than the Sears Tower, Wrigley Field or deep-dish pizza. The lunacy, the violence, the plethora of increasingly crazed pigs and those fierce feathered fowl all represent the political actors in a city that’s gone over the edge.

It all starts with the person who seems committed to win the current spirited competition as the most loathsome person in American political life: Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The same Mayor overseeing the closing of fifty-four schools and six community mental health clinics under the justification of a “budgetary crisis” has announced that the city will be handing over more than $100 million to DePaul University for a new basketball arena. This is part of a mammoth redevelopment project on South Lakeshore Drive consisting of a convention center anchored by an arena for a non-descript basketball team that has gone 47-111 over the last five years. It’s also miles away from DePaul’s campus. These aren’t the actions of a mayor. They’re the actions of a mad king.

Charles M. Blow: Blacks, Conservatives and Plantations

Why do Republicans keep endorsing the most extreme and hyperbolic African-American voices – those intent on comparing blacks who support the Democratic candidates to slaves? That idea, which only a black person could invoke without being castigated for the flagrant racial overtones, is a trope to which an increasingly homogeneous Republican Party seems to subscribe.

The most recent example of this is E.W. Jackson, who last weekend became the Virginia Republicans’ candidate for lieutenant governor in the state. [..]

The implication that most African-Americans can’t be discerning, that they can’t weigh the pros and cons of political parties and make informed decisions, that they are rendered servile in exchange for social services, is the highest level of insult. And black politicians are the ones Republicans are cheering on as they deliver it.

Now who, exactly, is being used here?

Bob Greenstein: Senator Vitter Offers — and Senate Democrats Accept — Stunning Amendment With Racially Tinged Impacts

In today’s Senate debate on the farm bill, Senator David Vitter offered — and Senate Democrats accepted — an amendment that would increase hardship and will likely have strongly racially discriminatory effects.

The amendment would bar from SNAP (food stamps), for life, anyone who was ever convicted of one of a specified list of violent crimes at any time — even if they committed the crime decades ago in their youth and have served their sentence, paid their debt to society, and been a good citizen ever since.  In addition, the amendment would mean lower SNAP benefits for their children and other family members.

So, a young man who was convicted of a single crime at age 19 who then reforms and is now elderly, poor, and raising grandchildren would be thrown off SNAP, and his grandchildren’s benefits would be cut.

Given incarceration patterns in the United States, the amendment would have a skewed racial impact.  Poor elderly African Americans convicted of a single crime decades ago by segregated Southern juries would be among those hit.

Richard (RJ) Eskow; Apple Pie May Be American, But Apple Computer Isn’t – Not Anymore

Did you know that Apple Computer was a foreign entity? Did you know that it’s more Irish than anything else, at least as far as taxes are concerned? Or that it pays very little in income tax, even though its products wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for projects funded by U.S. taxes?

Apple products were designed in the United States by U.S.-educated individuals and entrepreneurs. (Even Steve Jobs, who famously dropped out of college, said he came up with essential elements of Apple’s product design by auditing courses at Reed College.)

The company’s logo is an apple, which may or may not have been inspired by the Beatles-owned company of the same name. But the image has become synonymous with two iconic qualities of this country’s Silicon Valley: creativity and entrepreneurial drive. And what’s more American than apple pie?

Now that the world has seen its tax payments, maybe Apple should change its logo to a shamrock.

What do a zombie, handcuffs, a steamroller and a legislative luge run for job-killing trade agreements all have in common? They’re all apt metaphors of an expired, scandalously anti-democratic procedure called Fast Track.

And, I should know. I just wrote the book on it. How this little-known but extremely dangerous procedure was first hatched and how it has been used to ram extremely dangerous “trade” agreements through Congress over public opposition is a scary story. This is not a book for the nightmare-prone.

But everyone else should give it a read, because, gruesomely, the Obama administration and some in Congress are looking to bring Fast Track back from the dead.

With a powerful gang of corporations eager to use massive agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), now under negotiation, or the looming U.S.-EU Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA) to steamroll policies supported by the public and enacted by Congress, the threats posed by such an extreme procedure are severe.

Sharon Stapel; America has a Fundamental Problem with People Who Hate Gay People

A recent hate crime in New York City highlights the culture of hate that we have to change to protect people from violence

New York City is the heart of America’s “melting pot” of cultures and ideas. Yet even here, violence against those seen as “other” occurs. This week we mourn the brutal death of Mark Carson, a 32-year-old, shot and allegedly taunted with homophobic slurs by the shooter. The killing happened in Greenwich Village, one of the city’s most famous gay friendly neighborhoods.

In recent years, we at the New York City Anti-Violence Project have seen an increase in reports of anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer hate violence throughout the city and the country. From 2010 to 2011, we saw a 13% increase of reports of this violence in New York City, which followed an 11% increase from the year before. In 2011, our National Coalition (NCAVP) reported the highest number of LGBTQ bias-related homicides in its 15 year history.

Yet again after the homicide of Carson, we are left asking what we can do to prevent this violence from ever happening again?

Mattea Kramer and Jo Comerford: How America Became a Third World Country (2013-2023)

The streets are so much darker now, since money for streetlights is rarely available to municipal governments. The national parks began closing down years ago. Some are already being subdivided and sold to the highest bidder. Reports on bridges crumbling or even collapsing are commonplace. The air in city after city hangs brown and heavy (and rates of childhood asthma and other lung diseases have shot up), because funding that would allow the enforcement of clean air standards by the Environmental Protection Agency is a distant memory. Public education has been cut to the bone, making good schools a luxury and, according to the Department of Education, two of every five students won’t graduate from high school.

It’s 2023 — and this is America 10 years after the first across-the-board federal budget cuts known as sequestration went into effect.  They went on for a decade, making no exception for effective programs vital to America’s economic health that were already underfunded, like job training and infrastructure repairs. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

rebecca Solnit; What Comes After Hope

Too Soon to Tell: The Case for Hope, Continued

Ten years ago, my part of the world was full of valiant opposition to the new wars being launched far away and at home — and of despair. And like despairing people everywhere, whether in a personal depression or a political tailspin, these activists believed the future would look more or less like the present.  If there was nothing else they were confident about, at least they were confident about that. Ten years ago, as a contrarian and a person who prefers not to see others suffer, I tried to undermine despair with the case for hope.

A decade later, the present is still contaminated by the crimes of that era, but so much has changed. Not necessarily for the better — a decade ago, most spoke of climate change as a distant problem, and then it caught up with us in 10,000 ways. But not entirely for the worse either — the vigorous climate movement we needed arose in that decade and is growing now. If there is one thing we can draw from where we are now and where we were then, it’s that the unimaginable is ordinary, and the way forward is almost never a straight path you can glance down, but a labyrinth of surprises, gifts, and afflictions you prepare for by accepting your blind spots as well as your intuitions.

We know American politics are dysfunctional. But after a week of scandal obsession during which the nation’s capital and the media virtually ignored the problems most voters care about-jobs, incomes, growth, opportunity, education-it’s worth asking if there is something especially flawed about our democracy.

Our circumstances certainly have their own particular disabilities: a radicalization of conservative politics, over-the-top mistrust of President Obama on the right, high-tech gerrymandering in the House, and a Senate snarled by non-constitutional super-majority requirements.

Paul Buchheit: The Globalization of Hypocrisy

Big business has found its Utopia, a world in which millions of people are willing to work for a fraction of U.S. salaries.

In this dream world of global capitalism, young people are going from zero income on the farm to a few dollars a day on a 12-hour factory shift, and as a result, based on the World Bank’s poverty threshold of $1.25 per day, they’re no longer “in poverty.” So the media piles on praise for free markets. The Economist proclaimed that “poverty is declining everywhere.” The Washington Post gushed that “a billion people have been lifted from poverty through free-market competition.”

But the reality is very different. Inequality continues to grow, both between and within countries. Poverty levels haven’t changed much in 30 years, with almost half of humanity, up to three billion people, living on less than $2.50 a day. A quarter of the world’s children – over 170 million kids under age five – are growing up stunted because of malnutrition.

Thomas Hedges: What Will Tighter Restrictions on Trade in Iran Do?

A bipartisan team of U.S. senators has introduced a bill that would expand sanctions against Iran by targeting an estimated $100 billion worth of the country’s foreign currency reserves that are parked in overseas accounts. [..]

The new bill would sink Iran into its most severe era under U.S. sanctions, which were first enacted after the revolution in 1979. Restrictions on firms dealing with Iran were tightened in 1995 and then again in 2006. But the new measures, which would virtually eliminate Iran’s foreign currency reserves, are punitive enough, many say, to either topple the regime or spark another war in the Middle East.

Henry A. Giroux: Marching in Chicago: Resisting Rahm Emanuel’s Neoliberal Savagery

Across the globe, predatory capitalism spreads its gospel of power, greed, commodification, gentrification and inequality.  Through the combined forces of a market driven ideology, policy and mode of governance, the apostles of free-market capitalism are doing their best to dismantle historically guaranteed social provisions provided by the welfare state, define the accumulation of capital as the only obligation of democracy, increase the role of corporate money in politics, wage an assault on unions, expand the military-security state, increase inequalities in wealth and income, foster the erosion of civil liberties and undercut public faith in the defining institutions of democracy.1. As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish – from public schools to health-care centers – there is also a serious erosion of the discourses of community, justice, equality, public values and the common good. One does not have to look too far to see what happens in America’s neoliberal educational culture to see how ruthlessly the inequality of wealth, income and power bears down on those young people and brave teachers who are struggling every day to save the schools, unions and modes of pedagogy that offer hope at a time when schools have become just another commodity, students are reduced to clients or disposable populations, and teachers and their unions are demonized.

“This systematic abuse cannot be fixed with just one resignation, or two,” said David Camp, the Republican chairman of the House tax-writing committee, at an oversight hearing Friday morning dealing with the IRS. “This is not a personnel problem. This is a problem of the IRS being too large, too intrusive, too abusive.”

David Camp has it wrong. There has been a “systematic” abuse of power, but it’s not what Camp has in mind. The real scandal is that:

The IRS has interpreted our tax laws to allow big corporations and wealthy individuals to make unlimited secret campaign donations through sham political fronts called “social welfare organizations,” like Karl Rove’s “Crossroads,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and “Priorites USA.”

Marion Wright Edelman: How Children Transformed America

“Daddy,” the boy said, “I don’t want to disobey you, but I have made my pledge. If you try to keep me home, I will sneak off. If you think I deserve to be punished for that, I’ll just have to take the punishment. For, you see, I’m not doing this only because I want to be free. I’m doing it also because I want freedom for you and Mama, and I want it to come before you die.”

This teenage boy overheard talking to his father by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the hundreds of Birmingham children and youths who, 50 years ago this month, decided to stand up for freedom. They stood up to fire hoses and police dogs and went to jail by the hundreds and finally broke the back of Jim Crow in that city known as “Bombingham.” On this 50th anniversary of the Birmingham Children’s Crusade it is a time to remember, honor, and follow the example of the children who were frontline soldiers and transforming catalysts in America’s greatest moral movement of the 20th century – the movement for civil rights and equal justice.

Richard (RJ) Eskow; A Letter From Senator Warren

The day may come when the worst nightmare a crooked banker or compromised regulator can have begins with the words, “You have a letter from Senator Warren.”

But before we get to that, here’s an experience that may seem familiar: You’re at a party or family get-together – a Sunday barbecue, perhaps – and someone says something like, “We need less government regulation.” Next thing you know you’re having an argument.

Here’s some advice for the next social event: There’s no need to get into an argument. You can just ask, “How do you figure?”

With every unreasonable assertion you can ask a reality-based question like, “Where’s the study that says that?” Once in a while they may cite a shallow white paper from sine right-wing foundation, but more often than that they won’t even get that far. Soon the conversation will peter out with a “Well, uh …”

We can never go wrong asking questions. We only go wrong when we don’t ask questions.

Ray McGovern: Boston Suspect’s Writing on the Wall

Quick, somebody tell CIA Director John Brennan about the handwriting on the inside wall of the boat in which Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was hiding before Boston-area police riddled it and him with bullets. Tell Brennan that Tsarnaev’s note is in plain English and that it needs neither translation nor interpretation in solving the mystery: “why do they hate us?”

And, if Brennan will listen, remind him of when his high school teachers, the Irish Christian Brothers, taught him the meaning of “handwriting on the wall” in the Book of Daniel and why it became an idiom for predetermined, imminent doom.

Karl Rove is offering America a super-sized serving of political cynicism.

Since the controversy over the targeting of grassroots tea party groups for extra scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service arose, Rove has engaged in the sort of political sleight of hand that could only be practiced in a country where elite media have no skepticism-and no memory.

Just a few months ago, after the 2012 election, Rove was widely portrayed as having declared war on grassroots conservatives in general and the Tea Party movement in particular. The former White House political czar was frustrated: During the 2010 and 2012 election cycles, Republicans had been positioned to win control of the US Senate. Yet, in each cycle, they fell short after the party’s grassroots activists upended the candidacies of relatively more moderate candidates in Republican primaries. The Tea Party favorites frequently proved to be weaker contenders and-in the cases of candidates such as Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell in 2010 and Indiana’s Richard Mourdock in 2012-were seen as having snatched defeat from the jaws of certain victory.

Ari Berman IRS Fallout: The Real Scandal Is Secret Money Influencing US Elections

The IRS is under siege for investigating conservative political groups applying for tax-exempt status. But the real problem wasn’t that the IRS was too aggressive. It was that the agency focused on the wrong people-“none of those groups were big spenders on political advertising; most were local Tea Party organizations with shoestring budgets,” writes The New York Times-and wasn’t aggressive enough. The outrage that Washington should be talking about-what my colleague Chris Hayes calls “the scandal behind the scandal”-is how the Citizens United decision has unleashed a flood of secret spending in US elections that the IRS and other regulatory agencies in Washington, like the Federal Election Commission, have been unwilling or unable to stem.

Gail Collins: Hard of Hearings

Before Congress is finished with the Internal Revenue Service, there’s a serious danger some of us are going to wind up feeling sorry for the auditors.

And, honestly, that is not the way we were planning on spending the spring. Especially since it appears that there are people making decisions at the I.R.S. who have the intelligence of a wet Frisbee. [..]

If Congress wanted to help, the members could simplify the law so I.R.S. minions aren’t trying to figure out which groups spend only 49 percent of their resources on politics as opposed to 51 percent.

Or, they could give the I.R.S. more money to do the job it’s stuck with now. The budget has been cut almost $1 billion over the last few years, while its duties have expanded. Next Friday, I.R.S. workers will enjoy the first of a series of unpaid furloughs thanks to that sequester.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand: Bringing Justice to Victims of Sexual Assault in the Military

I was outraged by the news earlier this week that the coordinator of the Army’s program to prevent sexual assault at Fort Hood in Texas is under investigation for abusive sexual contact. This follows last week’s revelation that the officer tasked with preventing sexual assault in the Air Force had been arrested for assaulting a woman in a parking lot. It is hard to believe this was the second such incident in just over a week. All of this comes as the Pentagon released its own study showing a dramatic increase in sexual assaults and unwanted sexual contact in the military from 19,000 in 2011 to 26,000 in 2012. Even more concerning: only 3,374 of those cases were reported, and less than 10% of those were brought to trial.

While I appreciate Secretary Hagel’s taking positive steps to enact reform, we need more than just words or retraining. It’s increasingly clear that the military justice system is not working for its victims and the chain of command is incapable of policing itself when it comes to a zero tolerance reality for these serious crimes. Enough is enough. It is time for Congress to move forward now with bold reform that puts victims first.

Obsession with leaks, secret wars, enemies list. At least Nixon had no drones to take out the enemies

Without going over the edge to Rush Limbaugh territory, the internal spying on reporters and politicization of the IRS do raise the question. Could Obama be trumping “Tricky Dick” on the latter’s home turf? Few politicians can match Richard Milhous Nixon for obsession with leaks, propagation of secret wars and creation of a list of enemies.

Let’s consider the evidence thus far and remember first that an indignant bi-partisan Congressional investigation, a ferocious press well beyond Woodward and Bernstein and a public that was riveted to the hour-by-hour testimony exposed Nixon’s dirty tricks.

David Bromwich: Secrecy, Surveillance, and Public Safety

Three scandals have converged in the past week to preoccupy Congress and the press. Benghazi was the first to come, and it has surprised by its staying power. The larger issue in the background — the wisdom of the NATO destruction of the government of Libya which left an open field for anti-American militias — will probably never be discussed; and within the bounds of the intervention policy, it is unlikely that a satisfying American culprit will emerge. The abuse of power by the IRS may be, in the long run, the most damaging of these cases for the Obama presidency, but its outlines are only beginning to emerge. It is possible that IRS functionaries acted as they did without any systematic guidance from the top of the service; and possible, too, that over the many months of the harassment of anti-Obama groups, the executive branch never caught wind of the trouble and is as stunned as the rest of us. But the ugliest of the scandals has come from the revelation of the justice department’s seizure of two months of phone calls by 100 AP reporters. This was done to investigate the leak of a thwarted terrorist plot which the government itself had already decided to disclose in public.

Different as they are, the scandals all point to a single disorder that afflicts the Obama White House and the Holder justice department. The name of the disorder is paternalism, and its leading symptoms are suppression and secrecy. Paternalism is the ideology proper to a government that treats the governed as children.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: The False God of ‘Narrative’

It’s a funny thing about media leaks: They are either courageous or outrageous, depending on whether they help or hurt your political party.

Forgive me for feeling cynical and depressed about our nation’s political conversation. Scandalmania is distorting our discussion of three different issues, sweeping them into one big narrative-everything is a “narrative” these days-about the beleaguered second-term presidency of Barack Obama. [..]

I know, I know: This “confluence” of “scandals” spells “trouble” for the Obama administration. Well, sure, this has been hell week for the president. But what spells trouble for our country is our apparent eagerness to avoid debate about discrete problems by sacrificing the particulars and the facts to the idol of political narrative. It’s a false god.

Robert Reich: The Problem With Obama’s Second Term

Less than six months into a second term and the Obama White House is on the defensive and floundering: Benghazi, the IRS’s investigations of right-wing groups, the Justice Department’s snooping into journalists’ phone records, Obamacare behind schedule, the Administration’s push for gun control ending in failure.

Should the blame fall mainly on congressional Republicans and their allies in the right-wing media, whose vitriolic attacks on Obama are unceasing? [..]

But surely some of the seeming disarray is due to the President, whose insularity and aloofness make him an easy target, and whose eagerness to compromise and lack of focus continuously blurs his core message.

As we move toward the fifth anniversary of the great financial crisis of 2008, people should be outraged that cutting Social Security is now on the national agenda, while taxing Wall Street is not. After all, if we take at face value the claims made back in 2008 by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and former Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner, Wall Street excesses brought the economy to the brink of collapse.

But now the Wall Street behemoths are bigger than ever and President Obama is looking to cut the Social Security benefits of retirees. That will teach the Wall Street boys to be more responsible in the future. [..]

The basic story is very simple. Wall Street bankers have a lot more political power than old and disabled people who depend on Social Security. That is why President Obama is working to protect the former and cut benefits for the latter.

John Nichols: Dems to DOJ: ‘Very Troubled,’ ‘Inexcusable,’ ‘No Way to Justify This’

When John Lindsay was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1958, the Republican lawyer from Manhattan arrived on Capitol Hill as a man on a mission. “Often alone on the House floor,” recalled Nat Hentoff, “Lindsay wielded the Bill of Rights against its enemies.” [..]

Around the time that Lindsay was elected mayor of New York, California Democrat Don Edwards, a former FBI agent, arrived to take up the fight. For three decades, Edwards checked and balanced not just Republicans but Democrats who failed to recognize the rights of citizens and the essential role of a watchdog press. [..]

We remember Lindsay and Edwards because of the standard they set. They understood that the defense of the Bill of Rights in general, and freedom of the press in particular, must never be compromised by partisanship.

That’s why it was so very important when, after it was revealed that the Department of Justice had obtained the phone records of Associated Press journalists, both Patrick Leahy and Bob Goodlatte spoke up.

Robert Sheer; Elizabeth Warren, a Great Investment

Elizabeth Warren does great email. One payoff of my pittance of a contribution to her grass-roots funded campaign — I regret not contributing more — is that I am regularly alerted by the new Massachusetts senator to the favoritism of our Congress toward Wall Street.

That’s how I was reminded this week that Congress is about to let the interest rate charged for new student loans double to 6.8 percent at a time when the too-big-to-fail banks that caused the Great Recession continue to be bailed out at the rate of 0.75 percent. Yes, the banks pay less than 1 percent for money that we the taxpayers lend them. I know that such statistics are thought to be boring, but as Warren explained, the rate that students will have to pay “is nine times higher than the rate at which the government loans money to the big banks.”

Dave Johnson: News Media Should Clearly Inform Public About Obstruction, Filibuster

A NY Times editorial says Republicans need public pressure to get them to stop obstructing … everything. Meanwhile NY Times and other news coverage tends to obscure the source and extent of the problem and the damage it is doing to the country. Just months after a decisive election the country is paralyzed, the will of the people is thwarted and the information required to mobilize the pubic to take needed action is not forthcoming.

On Sunday, May 12, the NY Times ran an editorial, Who Can Take Republicans Seriously? The editorial concluded: “Only when the Republican Party feels public pressure to become a serious partner can the real work of governing begin.”

But news reports, even in the NY Times, tend to obscure the source of the obstruction, often even omitting the very words “filibuster” and “obstruction.”

Congress has a long road ahead on immigration reform. The Senate Judiciary Committee has started to consider some 300 amendments challenging the nearly 900-page bill crafted by the Gang of Eight. Lawmakers are hopeful that legislation will pass both houses by the end of summer. But from now until then, the detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants may continue full force. A group of advocates is now making a renewed call on President Obama to suspend deportations of those people who would gain status in the bill’s final version later this year. [..]

Obama met with representatives from more than a dozen progressive unions and business leaders in February, and declined a similar request to halt deportations at that time. Advocates point out that this time is different, because the bipartisan Gang of Eight has moved forward, and the move to suspend deportations would work around the current proposal. In February, Obama stated that he didn’t want to start a controversy that could derail the bill in Congress. But by his not heeding the voices of the families whose loved ones have been removed, the controversy of record high deportations continues.

Jenny Brown and Stephanie Seguin: We Won’t Stop Until the Morning After Pill Is Available to All, Regardless of Age

For a decade, we have protested and battled in court for Plan B access. Enough with the Obama administration’s delays

We have been fighting for a decade for something so basic: for women in America to have easy access to safe and affordable birth control, including the “morning-after pill” (sometimes referred to by the specific drug name of Plan B).

We won a key victory when a federal judge ordered the Obama administration to make the morning-after pill available other over-the-counter – in other words, to make it available without a prescription. Unfortunately, our fight didn’t end there as the administration tried to delay, but last week the courts again ruled on the side of women’s access to birth control, regardless of age.

Lauren Carsick: As the UN Evades Responsibility for the Cholera Epidemic, Haitians Continue to Suffer

Advocates for over 5,000 victims of cholera in Haiti put the UN on notice that they intend to file suit in a national court if the UN continues its refusal to provide compensation for its negligence in introducing cholera to the country. Haiti’s first cholera epidemic in over a century compounded the misery in a country reeling from the devastating 2010 earthquake that ravaged its already vulnerable health and sanitation system. As of this month, the epidemic has caused incalculable suffering – the death toll from cholera exceeds 8,100, and over 654,000 Haitians have been sickened.  Despite multiple scientific studies that have consistently attributed the cause of the outbreak of cholera in Haiti to UN troops from Nepal and the UN’s negligent waste disposal system, the UN is claiming that it is immune from claims.The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and theBureau des Avocats Internationauxsubmitted a claim on behalf of cholera victims for relief and reparations to the UN on November 3, 2011,requesting that the UN upgrade the national water and sanitation infrastructure, provide compensation to victims for their losses, and issue a public apology

Suzanne York: Koalas: The Canary in Australia’s Coal Mine?

The news of late out of Australia has not been the most encouraging.  

For starters, the country continues to mine coal at a rapid pace, upping its exports of the dirty fuel.  It is the world’s biggest coal exporter.  A recent report found that if the expected expansions of Australia’s coal exports continue as planned, global carbon dioxide emissions could increase by 1.2 billion metric tons a year. [..]

And one last news item of note has been the worsening plight of koalas, the unofficial symbol of Australia. Climate change is amongst the many concerns facing the marsupials, where more occurrences of extremes in weather pose a threat to the koala population.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made a point of emphasizing during the Bush v. Gore arguments in December 2000 that there is no federal constitutional guarantee of a right to vote for president. Scalia was right. Indeed, as the reform group FairVote reminds us, “Because there is no right to vote in the U.S. Constitution, individual states set their own electoral policies and procedures. This leads to confusing and sometimes contradictory policies regarding ballot design, polling hours, voting equipment, voter registration requirements, and ex-felon voting rights. As a result, our electoral system is divided into 50 states, more than 3,000 counties and approximately 13,000 voting districts, all separate and unequal.”

Mark Pocan and Keith Ellison want to do something about that.

The two congressmen, both former state legislators with long histories of engagement with voting-rights issues, on Monday unveiled a proposal to explicitly guarantee the right to vote in the Constitution.

John Aravosis: When 3 Gunmen Shoot 19 at a Mother’s Day Parade, It’s Not “Terrorism”

No terrorism please, we’re gunmen.  A bizarre story out of New Orleans, where two or three gunmen opened fire on a Mother’s Day parade, injuring 19 people, including two children.

Sure sounds awfully familiar, almost like a redux of the Boston Marathon bombing.  But you’d be wrong.

You see, when two guys use bombs to hurt people en masse at a marathon, it’s instantly “terrorism.”  But when two to three people use guns to hurt people en masse at a parade, it’s simply “the relentless drumbeat of street violence.”

What’s the difference?

A homemade bomb versus a gun, by the looks of it.

Pauk Buchheit: Atlas Shrugged Off Taxes

Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” fantasizes a world in which anti-government citizens reject taxes and regulations, and “stop the motor” by withdrawing themselves from the system of production. In a perverse twist on the writer’s theme the prediction is coming true. But instead of productive people rejecting taxes, rejected taxes are shutting down productive people.

Perhaps Ayn Rand never anticipated the impact of unregulated greed on a productive middle class. Perhaps she never understood the fairness of tax money for public research and infrastructure and security, all of which have contributed to the success of big business. She must have known about the inequality of the pre-Depression years. But she couldn’t have foreseen the concurrent rise in technology and globalization that allowed inequality to surge again, more quickly, in a manner that threatens to put the greediest offenders out of our reach.

Nick Turse: Nuclear Terror in the Middle East

Lethality Beyond the Pale

In those first minutes, they’ll be stunned. Eyes fixed in a thousand-yard stare, nerve endings numbed. They’ll just stand there. Soon, you’ll notice that they are holding their arms out at a 45-degree angle. Your eyes will be drawn to their hands and you’ll think you mind is playing tricks. But it won’t be. Their fingers will start to resemble stalactites, seeming to melt toward the ground. And it won’t be long until the screaming begins. Shrieking. Moaning. Tens of thousands of victims at once. They’ll be standing amid a sea of shattered concrete and glass, a wasteland punctuated by the shells of buildings, orphaned walls, stairways leading nowhere.

This could be Tehran, or what’s left of it, just after an Israeli nuclear strike.