“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Jessica Valenti: How to talk to your kids about Santa: relax, lie, have a drink, repeat
‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the world, children were getting existential. Keep them innocent a little while longer. Everybody wins
I remember confronting my own father about the existence of Santa when I was a little older than my daughter is now. In response, my father told me to close my eyes and imagine a red ball in my mind: “Is it there? Do you see it?” Yes, I said, and my father replied, “Well, see – it’s real! Just like Santa.”
I don’t remember exactly what I said in response, but I recall the sentiment: What a crock of shit. [..]
Keeping certain truths from our children has become a natural part of raising them – and parents, for the most part, have good intentions going in. There are difficult things about the world that kids are too young to understand or that they’ll find too upsetting, and, when we can, every parent shields their children from pain or trauma. But every year, our kids get older and the line between protection and dishonesty gets thinner and thinner – and lying to them saves us a little hurt now but runs the risk of causing distrust later.
I wonder if the little white lies are more about our discomfort with our children growing up at all – keeping them innocent for just a little while longer is perhaps not just for their sakes, but for our own.
Maybe that’s OK. My daughter will be jaded soon enough and, once her teen years hit, I’m sure she’ll be mad at me about a whole host of things that have nothing to do with magical reindeer and everything to do with “unreasonable” curfews and schoolwork. So for now, I’m forgiving myself for the fibs. They do make life easier, and Layla seems to enjoy them.
So until she asks me when she already knows the answer, as far as I’m concerned Santa is real, the Tooth Fairy leaves money, and Mommy’s end-of-day cocktail is “juice” for grown-ups. Everybody wins.
Rebecca Solnit: Let’s leave behind the age of fossil fuel. Welcome to Year One of the climate revolution
In that little junk shop on a quiet street in San Francisco, I held a relic from one of the great upheavals of the last millennium. It made me think of a remarkable statement the great feminist fantasy writer Ursula K Le Guin had made only a few weeks earlier. In the course of a speech she gave while accepting a book award, she noted:
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.
That document I held was written only a few years after the French had gotten over the idea that the divine right of kings was an inescapable reality. The revolutionaries had executed their king for his crimes and were then trying out other forms of government. It’s popular to say that the experiment failed, but that’s too narrow an interpretation. France never again regressed to an absolutist monarchy and its experiments inspired other liberatory movements around the world (while terrifying monarchs and aristocrats everywhere).
Americans are skilled at that combination of complacency and despair that assumes things cannot change and that we, the people, do not have the power to change them. Yet you have to be abysmally ignorant of history, as well as of current events, not to see that our country and our world have always been changing, are in the midst of great and terrible changes, and are occasionally changed through the power of the popular will and idealistic movements. As it happens, the planet’s changing climate now demands that we summon up the energy to leave behind the Age of Fossil Fuel – and maybe with it some portion of the Age of Capitalism as well.
Holiday shoppers can help ensure their gifts are produced under fair conditions
Yuletide lore tells us that the clothing and toys that appear under the Christmas tree are made by cheerful elves in Santa’s workshop. While they are likely to be made far away, of course we know that the gifts don’t come from the North Pole.
Wherever they are stationed, Santa’s real-life helpers deserve safe and fair working conditions. And Christmas shoppers have an opportunity to help.
Over the last two years, anti-sweatshop campaigners have focused on the plight of garment workers in Bangladesh and Cambodia. In the wake of the horrific collapse of Rana Plaza in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2012, which killed 1,100 employees of several garment factories, labor advocates have been pushing for safeguards that would avoid similar tragedies. Similarly, after a series of national strikes by garment workers in Cambodia, European manufacturers have pledged to raise wages. Activists are now calling on U.S. brands to do the same.
In the past two decades, labor rights advocates have helped enact reforms to curtail child labor and improve working conditions in the garment industry. However, there is still a long way to go.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: Change in Cuba policy is a nod to reality
President Obama’s decision to normalize relations with Cuba is a decision to recognize reality. For 50 years, the United States has pursued a policy that has failed. The embargo hurt the Cuban people it claimed to help and bolstered the regime that it intended to undermine. The effort to isolate Cuba has been increasingly isolating the United States both in the hemisphere and across the world. And as the president concluded, “I do not believe we can keep doing the same thing for over five decades and expect a different result.” To believe that would be, as Albert Einstein taught us, the very definition of insanity.
The best evidence that this change was long overdue was provided by the hysterical and incoherent reactions of its opponents. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a potential presidential contender, embraced the initiative, making an indisputable comment about the embargo: “If the goal is regime change, it sure doesn’t seem to be working.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) replied that Paul “has no idea what he’s talking about.” [..]
In April, Obama will attend the Summit of the Americas in Panama along with other presidents, including Cuba’s Raúl Castro. There, we might listen more and bluster less. The end of the embargo – if it is lifted – may mark the beginning of a new good-neighbor policy, not just toward Cuba but toward other countries in the hemisphere. We would all profit from that.
Michelle Chen: Is Your Favorite Chocolate the Product of Child Labor?
A good chunk of that deliciousness on our holiday dessert trays is sourced from lush farmlands of West Africa, where cocoa beans are tenderly grown and processed to meet the scrutiny of international quality controls. The end product is a painstakingly nurtured commodity valued like no other in the world. The same cannot be said of the children working the land.
That’s because the global agriculture industry continues to yield one particularly bitter crop: child labor. The big companies who run the massively profitable chocolate trade have done little to prevent trafficked and forced labor, and even less to address the poverty that pushes poor children into the fields. According to the field research just published by the International Labor Rights Forum, the problems that lead to child labor are more complex than the sad images we occasionally see of gaunt, cutlass-wielding kids in the fields. The global agricultural trade is structured to ensure that the most savage forms of resource extraction are linked into the most sophisticated commodities markets. Under this system, farmers are denied control over their production process and cannot negotiate fair prices or wages in the global marketplace.
The millions of farmers working in this decentralized production system have virtually no financial power over what happens to their crop en route to Western candy stores
Lynn Stuart Parramore: Shame is good, shame is right, and shame works
Society needs to motivate CEO Scrooges to change their ways
Does trumpeting scoundrels’ misdeeds set them straight? [..]
History shows that in cases when the law or public consensus has rendered an act reprehensible, society has contrived an impressive array of shaming devices – the dunce cap, the pillory, ducking chairs to plunge the guilty into rivers and ponds and tarring and feathering. The idea, of course, is to not only punish the culprits but also to deter other potential wrongdoers from following suit.
What would be appropriate for CEOs who pinch the wages of their employees while earning hundreds of times more than the lowest paid among them? A scarlet G for “greed” sewn to their lapels? Don’t laugh: Some judges have been known to get creative with sentencing when the ordinary route of punishment doesn’t seem to work. A Los Angeles Times op-ed noted that a judge in La Habra, California, ordered a slumlord to live in his own rundown building under house arrest for two months, and a Cleveland judge sentenced a man who had bullied a neighbor and her handicapped children to stand on the side of the highway carrying a sign describing his crimes. Perhaps a judge equipped with the latest CEO pay disclosures could sentence some corporate titan found guilty of stealing wages to live on the salary of his lowest-paid employee for a time. There is something rather satisfying about ideas like that.
Shaming may not bring America’s corporate Scrooges immediately around to a Dickensian redemption, but it can play a key role in creating a societal consensus that certain behaviors are indeed disgraceful – and that’s a start. No shame, no blame, you might say.
On this day in 1955,
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