Tag: Open Thread

States have tried all sorts of things to prevent women from having abortions. They’ve enacted waiting periods, ultrasound laws and parental notifications. They’ve passed laws that force doctors to lie to women and force women to visit with ideological zealots. Some legislators have even attempted to make women get a man’s consent before obtaining the procedure – a paternalistic permission slip to access their legal rights.

But Alabama has brought efforts to restrict abortion to a whole new level, as the state tried this week to stop a woman from getting an abortion by terminating her parental rights… to her fetus. [..]

Baffling legal maneuvering aside, what’s worst in cases like this one in Alabama – where the state focuses its misogynist ire on the most marginalized women – is that they’re commonplace. Women in prison, women who use drugs, women of color and low-income women have long been targets for anti-choice legislators, not just because they have less support to fight back, but because the people attacking them believe that no one will care. It’s nastiness of the worst sort.

Abortion is legal. And while I’d like to say that no amount of strange, overreaching and insulting litigation or legislation will change that, it has, and it still could. And if it does, we know who will be penalized most.

David Cay Johnston: Blame government policies for the economic slowdown

Our economy is promoting the hoarding of cash and assets at the top

Around the world, financial pages report that the global economy is slowing and might even contract.

Prices of commodities are falling, with copper, cotton, grains and oil all down by about half in the last five years – a strong signal of slowing growth.

Companies are tightening their belts, with fewer perks and fringe benefits. An inadvertently leaked report showed that staff economists at the Federal Reserve are more pessimistic about the near future than the official Fed positions. And big companies with nowhere else to put their piles of cash are buying back their stock or buying up competitors, which means fewer well-paying management jobs.

Yet hardly any of these reports citing official sources and economic data connect the dots to outline what’s behind this unwelcome trend in the U.S.: government policies.

Governments are helping big industries by diminishing competition, providing abundant cheap credit for speculation rather than investment and failing to rein in price gouging. In turn, these policies produce a growing concentration of income and wealth at the top while the vast majority struggle with falling wages, flat incomes, job insecurity and a shrinking slice of investment assets.

Steven W. Thrasher: Samuel DuBose’s killing is a dark cloud with a grim silver lining

There is nothing good, but there is much bad and ugly, about the fact that Samuel DuBose’s killing at the hands of University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing was caught on video by a body camera. He is still needlessly dead.

But there is a silver lining in what it can mean going forward, as Aubrey DuBose, Samuel’s brother, articulated at a press conference on Wednesday. It’s a silver lining when a white prosecutor, Joe Deters, got up in front of the Cincinnati press and unequivocally denounced the “unnecessary” but “purposeful” killing of DuBose as “murder” – without any of the usual equivocation which makes black victims have to defend themselves from beyond the grave. There’s a lining in Deters, the representative of his city, saying that he feels “sorry for his family” and not expressing something crude like, say, blaming him for his death, as the City of Cleveland did with Tamir Rice. There’s a lining in that, unlike Ferguson Prosecutor Bob McCulloch, Deters seemed to want an indictment, got one from a grand jury and swiftly had Tensing in custody. [..]

I feel far more angry than celebratory by this video. I am angered that without the video, DuBose would have been written off as a murderous thug who deserved to die. I am angered that Cincinnati officials placed suspicion on black people citywide for the actions of a police officer. And most of all, I am angry that even wearing a body cam did not stop Tensing from shooting DuBose in the head.

Sen. Jeff Merkley: It’s Time for Shell to Abandon Its Irresponsible Arctic Drilling Plans

At this moment, the damaged Fennica icebreaker is entering the water in my home of Portland, OR, in what could be a make-or-break moment for our environment and our future climate. [..]

Drilling in the Arctic is the height of irresponsibility. If the Chukchi leases are developed and Shell begins operations, a major oil spill is extremely likely. We all remember the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which resulted in billions of dollars in economic damage to coastal communities and devastating pollution from the 4.9 million barrels of oil that were dumped into the warm Gulf waters. The harsh climate and remote location of the Arctic would make cleanup of a comparable spill nearly impossible, and if a spill happens during the winter, months could pass before a well could be plugged.

Additionally, we should not be investing in infrastructure that will lock in decades of production — and carbon pollution — from previously unexploited fossil fuel reserves. The science is clear that we have already discovered five times as much fossil fuel as we can afford to burn if we hope to avert catastrophic climate change. Human civilization already faces enormous challenges from climate change.

This week, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid, which have provided millions of Americans with accessible, affordable health care.

These are lifelines that from their start were attacked by Republicans and their extremist allies around the country. But we held strong and 50 years later, generations of Americans have benefited from Medicare and Medicaid.

Now we are witnessing another ideological attack that would put women’s health and women’s lives at risk – this time by targeting women’s reproductive health care, an issue that was resolved back in 1973.

Today, the Republican majority is forcing another vote to defund an organization that for nearly 100 years has provided women and their families with preventive and life-saving health care – Planned Parenthood.

Dean Baker: Export-Import Bank debate reveals the corruption of economics

Ending this government entry into the credit market should be a no-brainer

In the recent debate on trade policy, most reputable economists favored fast track trade authority and the approval of Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is likely to be the first trade deal to be covered by the new fast-track rules. Their argument was simple: The reduction of tariffs and other trade barriers will increase efficiency and economic growth. This is the standard argument for free trade.

Given this general view within the economics profession why TPP is good policy, it is striking that so few economists have been outspoken in opposition to the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, a government agency that aids U.S. exports through loan and insurance guarantees. On June 30, Congress did not reauthorize the bank, which meant that it could not extend new credit, though it could still manage its existing portfolio of loans. Republican Senators led a vote to reauthorize the bank in the Senate, and now the issue has moved to the House. The whole point of the Ex-Im Bank, of course, is to have the government subsidize selected companies by giving them access to credit at below-market interest rates. This is totally at odds with free trade. It means the government is allocating credit rather than markets. It would be expected to lead to the same type of economic distortions as tariffs and quotas.

Leonard Pitts, Jr.: Police Brutality Is A Problem For Everyone

This will not be a column about Sandra Bland, although it could be.

Certainly there is cause for outrage over the way a Texas state trooper escalated the routine traffic stop of an indignant African-American woman into a violent arrest; she died of an apparent jail cell suicide three days later. But Chuck would say that in habitually defining police violence as a black problem, we make it smaller than it is.

Chuck is a reader who responded to a question I passed on in this space a few months back from another reader, a white woman named Tracy. “What can I do?” she asked, as a private citizen, to fight police brutality against African Americans? [..]

This will not be a column about Sandra Bland, although it could be.

Certainly there is cause for outrage over the way a Texas state trooper escalated the routine traffic stop of an indignant African-American woman into a violent arrest; she died of an apparent jail cell suicide three days later. But Chuck would say that in habitually defining police violence as a black problem, we make it smaller than it is.

Chuck is a reader who responded to a question I passed on in this space a few months back from another reader, a white woman named Tracy. “What can I do?” she asked, as a private citizen, to fight police brutality against African Americans?

Dave Johnson: Did Obama Administration Downplay Malaysia Slavery To Grease Trade Deal?

Cheap labor is the whole point of our corporate-rigged, NAFTA-style trade agreements. Companies get to move jobs, factories, even entire industries out of the U.S. to countries where people are exploited, the environment is not protected and “costs” like human safety are kept low.

But even so … tolerating slavery? Flat-out slavery? Really? Unfortunately, it looks like that’s what is happening with fast-track trade promotion authority, The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Obama administration.

Voting rights around the country have been under serious assault in recent years. In 2008, President Obama was elected with the outsized support of African Americans, students and women. After the 2010 mid-term elections, new Republican majorities in state houses across the country began to pursue an aggressive voter restriction strategy, not seen since the undoing of post-Civil War Reconstruction. From early 2011 through the 2012 election, state lawmakers introduced at least 180 bills to make voting more difficult in 41 states. By 2014, voter rights had been significantly impaired in 21 states, say the expert attorneys at the Brennan Center for Justice.

The attack has been particularly relentless in Wisconsin. Since being sworn into office, Governor Scott Walker and Lt. Gov. Kleefisch have ushered into law one of the strictest “voter ID” requirements in the nation, even worse than the original American Legislative Exchange Council “model” bill. Although voter fraud is virtually nonexistent in the state, experts say that some 300,000 people lack the form of ID required to vote under the new law. If historic voting patterns are any indication, the majority of them are women.

Sandra Fulton: Cyber Bill Gives Companies Perfect Cover to Gut Your Privacy

Following several high-profile data breaches – such as those at Sony and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management – Congress is once again feeling the pressure to push “cybersecurity” legislation.

The problem is, the bill they’re laser-focused on is misguided, wouldn’t protect us – and is a huge gift to companies wanting legal cover if and when they choose to violate Americans’ privacy rights. [..]

If CISA passes, companies would be permitted to monitor and then report to the government on vaguely defined “cyber-threat indicators” – a term so broad that it covers actual threats hackers pose to computer systems but also sweeps in information on crimes like carjacking and burglaries. Those are serious offenses to be sure, but they have nothing to do with cybersecurity.

While current law allows companies to monitor their own systems for cyber threats, CISA would take this to the next level. The bill would allow companies that hold huge swaths of our personal data – like health insurers and credit-card companies – to monitor and report online activity “notwithstanding any other provision of law.”

This means that CISA would undermine the strong protections embedded in laws like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 and the Privacy Act of 1964 – laws designed to keep the government from spying on our communications.

Ruth Coniff: The Battle Over Education and Civil Rights

“This is a historic moment to end 13 years of legislative malpractice” NEA president Lily Eskelsen Garcia says of the federal K12 education law that Congress is currently hashing out.

Congress has failed to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act ever since George Bush rewrote the law and renamed it No Child Left Behind in 2002.

The original Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, was part of a civil-rights-era drive to rectify glaring inequality.

It dealt with disproportionate funding within and among the states. It created grants to help low-income students, built libraries and provided text books to schools in poor areas.

All of that changed with No Child Left Behind.

Peggy cooper Davis: The legal erasure of black families

In his new book “Between the World and Me,” Ta-Nehisi Coates recounts taking his four-year-old son, Samori, to a movie theater in Manhattan’s reputedly progressive Upper West Side. Coates and Samori are riding an escalator to exit the theater. Samori, who is doe-eyed beautiful, moves too slowly to suit a white woman on the escalator; the woman pushes him and says, “Come on.” Her tone is not described, but Coates reports his furious response in vivid detail. His rage leads to a loud argument with the woman and then with bystanders who come to her defense. Coates pushes one of the defenders, to which the defender responds, “I could have you arrested!”

Coates is a black man, a member of a socially constructed people who, he points out, have existed in America longer as slaves than as free citizens. And while it might be tempting to interpret the woman’s push and her words as ambivalent, or perhaps even as benevolent, for Coates they must have been stunningly resonant with the social disregard and legal erasure that black parents endured in slavery and in post-slavery apprentice systems – in which black children were apprenticed to former masters, sometimes against their parents’ wishes – and that they continue to endure in the racially disproportionate surveillance of clumsy child welfare systems.

I have been helping countries to overcome financial crises for 30 years, and have studied the economic crises of the twentieth century as background to my advisory work. In all crises, there is an inherent imbalance of power between creditor and debtor. Successful crisis management therefore depends on the creditor’s wisdom. In this regard, I strongly urge Germany to rethink its approach to Greece.

A financial crisis is caused by a country’s excessive indebtedness, which generally reflects a combination of mismanagement by the debtor country, over-optimism, corruption, and the poor judgment and weak incentives of creditor banks. Greece fits that bill. [..]

When a country’s prosperity depends on the continued inflow of capital, a sudden stop or reversal of financial flows triggers a sharp contraction. In Greece, the easy lending stopped with the 2008 global financial crisis. The economy shrunk by 18 percent from 2008 to 2011, and unemployment soared from 8 percent to 18 percent.

The most obvious cause was lower government spending, which reduced aggregate demand. Public-sector workers lost their jobs, and construction projects ground to a halt. As incomes declined, other domestic sectors collapsed.

Dave Zirin: Why Boston Was Compelled to Pull Their 2024 Olympic Bid

The crumbling of Boston’s 2024 Olympic bid is a victory for activists and a loss for the city’s most entrenched business interests.

“What we do matters.” “We are many, they are few.” “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.”

These phrases are what people trying to affect change often say quietly to avoid slouching into despair. Today, they are what crews of Bostonians are singing to one another over rowdy, joyous toasts, confident that their actions just beat back the most powerful plutocrats in town. Make no mistake about it: The 2024 Summer Olympics were on a runaway freight train toward Boston until serious groups of committed citizens got in the way. Local sports legends like Larry Bird and David Ortiz were part of the thirty person ceremonial board of directors preaching that the Olympics would be all financial boom and patriotic pageantry. The powerful-and less telegenic-brokers behind them had the money, the media, and the mayor. But they did not have the people and that made all the difference. [..]

This is an absolute victory for the people of Boston. It is particularly critical for those who would have been most likely to suffer under the weight of a massive police and military presence in the city. But it is also a very positive development for everyone who loves Olympic sports. The IOC is only going to change its methods of extortion when city after city across the globe say ‘hell no’ to their outlandish demands, always conjoined with the economic prerogatives of local business titans and the politicians they grease. Boston should be proud. They have now joined Kraków and Oslo among those who have sent the IOC packing. Now it’s the turn of Los Angeles, Toronto, Budapest, Hamburg, Paris, and Rome, all in the running for 2024, to add their names to this list. Thank you Boston for saving your city and rebuffing those who would ruthlessly exploit what we love about sports and remake our cities into unrecognizable dystopian theme parks.

Hassen Hussein: What exactly is Obama’s Africa legacy?

Washington’s engagement with the continent continues to prioritize security over human rights and economic partnership

President Barack Obama today concludes his triumphant fourth trip to Africa, which featured a return to Kenya and a controversial stopover in Ethiopia, the seat of the African Union. During the visit, he attended an entrepreneurial summit in Nairobi and held discussions with Kenyan, Ethiopian and other regional leaders on matters ranging from U.S.-Africa trade and investment and regional security to human rights.

Obama is the first sitting U.S. president to visit the two countries. And as the first African-American president, he is still a subject of pride to Africans and their vast diaspora. Yet the question must be asked: What exactly is Obama’s Africa legacy? What are the symbolism and substance of what is likely his final trip to Africa as president? Did the U.S. Africa policy evolve or regress during his administration? Although I would like to join those celebrating the homecoming of a local son, I am filled with melancholy and mixed emotions. Obama’s presidency has fallen short of our admittedly high expectations.

Joshua Kopstein: Don’t fear the drones, fear the cops

Civilian incidents shouldn’t overshadow dangers of letting police drones rule the skies

In the last few years, media reports on hobbyist drones have flown in a frightening and predictable pattern. Nearly every week, these small, camera-equipped, radio-controlled helicopters are framed as public hazards or futuristic tools for criminals – crashing on the White House lawn, attempting cross-border drug deliveries, flying too close to airplanes or attacking Enrique Iglesias on stage. Too often and much to their users’ dismay, they’re conflated with the military death machines (regrettably also called drones) that fire missiles at suspected terrorists and unsuspecting civilians overseas under dubious legal justifications. [..]

While these stories clearly resonate with members of the drone-fearing public, the hype and hysteria can overshadow the fact that drones, like all technologies, are imperfect tools: not good or evil or neutral, beholden to their users and hard coded with the biases of their creators. And if there’s a group of drone users that deserves scrutiny and fear, it’s not our next-door neighbors; it’s the police.