Sadhbh Walshe at The Guardian wonders Why can't western women seem to figure out the corporate world?
It's kind of heartening and despairing at the same time that women in developing countries are showing us Western ladies how it's done. In India, a country not known for its reverence of the female kind, 11% of CEOs of large companies are women, and the number of female executives at board level is on the rise. Brazilian women are doing even better—14% of CEOs are female, and they also have a female head of state. Meanwhile, in the "developed" world, female representation on boards and in the tops jobs is either stagnating or in decline. In the US, only 3% of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are women. In Britain, there are only two female CEOs in the FTSE 100 and Australia has only 12 women chief executives in its top 200 companies.
Lindsay Beyerstein at
In These Times writes
No, Matt Yglesias, Bangladeshi Workers Didn’t Choose To Be Crushed To Death:
Yglesias’s argument was based on an implicit false premise and a bizarre hypothetical.
The false premise was that whatever caused the building collapse was legal in Bangladesh. But it turns out that Bangladeshis are as averse to being buried alive as we are. There is a national building code in Bangladesh and the politically well-connected owner of Rana Plaza flouted every rule in the book.
Now for the bizarre hypothetical: If Bangladeshis had voted themselves such lax safety laws that anyone could build a tower of any height without any input from an architect, well, I guess that would be their prerogative. And if my grandmother had balls she’d be my grandfather.
Paul Krugman at
The New York Times writes
The Story of Our Time:
Now, just to be clear, this is not a case for more government spending and larger budget deficits under all circumstances—and the claim that people like me always want bigger deficits is just false. For the economy isn’t always like this—in fact, situations like the one we’re in are fairly rare. By all means let’s try to reduce deficits and bring down government indebtedness once normal conditions return and the economy is no longer depressed. But right now we’re still dealing with the aftermath of a once-in-three-generations financial crisis. This is no time for austerity.
Michael Gerson at the Washington Post writes paragraph after paragraph filled with nonsense like the one below under a headline that of the same ilk, George W. Bush, a principled president:
His two terms defy summary, just as a snapshot can’t capture Niagara Falls during a lightning storm. I experienced the Bush presidency as a series of emergencies punctuated by holiday parties. I’ll leave it to others to critique Bush’s choices on Iraq and other issues, a task considerably easier than making them under pressure. I saw Bush’s steadiness after 9/11, which steadied me and many others. His decision to pursue the troop surge in Iraq, after many of his generals had misplaced their judgment and nerve. His response to the financial crisis—extending FDIC protections, backing the Federal Reserve’s increase in liquidity, passing the Troubled Assets Relief Program bill—which put guardrails along the economic abyss.
Yasmin Alibhai Brown at
The Independent says that
Behind the use of drones is a complacent belief that murdering Muslims is always justifiable:
Millions of irreproachable Muslims are bewildered and enraged by this global vendetta which seems determined to annihilate modernism, occidental values, and also to destabilise some of the poorest and most hapless of nation states for reasons not made clear at all. Why are they trying to destroy Mali’s old culture for example? Some of us feel ashamed that Islam has become a byword for sinister, guerrilla warfare and is now regarded as a monstrous, rogue faith, easily turned into a killing call, most effectively for young men for whom life lacks meaning and direction. Women are now joining in too. The “spiritual leaders” behind the mayhem are wicked and psychologically manipulative men interested only in high body-counts and lurid publicity.
OK, now let’s turn to the most dominant countries in the world—and their finessed, widespread, extreme tactics used against people, some evidently fanatic and dangerous, others totally innocent. This is state-sponsored, state-activated, state-engineered terrorism which we are just meant to accept as a proportionate response to the evil above. More people are victimised by the unaccountable, secretive actions of the western nations —the US and UK most notably—than all those victimised by Islamicists. Most brainwashed and genuinely frightened westerners just accept what their governments do in fighting a nebulous “war on terror.” Hundreds of thousands are killed, physically and psychologically maimed and shocked and awed by western weaponry. It is fair enough and sensible to use intelligence and prevent plots home and abroad, but what is happening and has been since 9/11 is not defensible, moral, right, just or sane.
Jessica Valenti at
The Nation writes that
The Politico Piece on Jill Abramson: Trust Us, It's Sexist.
No one—especially not the editor of The New York Times—should be beyond critique. But the characterizations of Abramson weren’t criticisms, they were complaints. There hasn’t been a spate of firings or high=profile departures to link Abramson to, and the paper just won four Pulitzers; without any substance to back up Byers’s claims, the piece comes as a well-worn caricature of the bitchy boss.
Linda Chavez at
Townhall asks
Could We Have Caught the Boston Bombers Earlier?:
We won't get better at preventing such terrorist acts, however, until all counterterrorism information is shared between agencies. Congress should investigate why this isn't happening. If the reason is that the agencies lack the legal authority to do so, Congress should change the laws. But even before that happens, the FBI should launch its own investigation into why officials in their Boston office didn't quickly discover Tsarnaev's name in their own files and act on it immediately after the bombing.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune understates a tad in
Michele Bachmann's troubling lack of candor:
Bachmann’s typical response is to ignore the negative publicity and the questions about her judgment and act like nothing happened. That strategy has served the charismatic conservative firebrand and four-term U.S. House representative fairly well—up to this point.
Her core supporters usually shrug off bad press as media bias. The media, particularly in this age of nonstop news coverage, gives up and speeds off to the next political gaffe or miniscandal of the day.
But Bachmann’s just-ignore-it approach is completely unacceptable for the high-profile political imbroglio she’s in now.
Leonard Pitts Jr. at the
Miami Herald writes
Reese Witherspoon’s bratty question: Do you know who I am?:
Do you know who I am? It might as well be the battle cry of privilege. The rest of us have a complicated relationship with privilege.
We know the rules apply differently to those who possess celebrity. It gets you better seats in restaurants, more attentive service in stores. You don’t wait in lines. And if you find yourself in trouble, you may even receive the kind of “justice” O.J. Simpson did in 1995.
Scott Stringer at the
New York Daily News writes
New York City tech jobs for the working class :
Even as local unemployment hovers near 9%, companies tell us they cannot fill a range of middle-to-high-skill jobs—many of which pay $65,000 a year and up.
Meeting that need starts with building a competitive workforce for the 21st century, not only by attracting skilled labor from around the world through immigration reform, but also by incubating talent right here at home.
It starts with creating a modern curriculum that goes beyond reading and math. We need to teach our children computer science and provide them with the entrepreneurial skills necessary to build their own businesses.
Bradley Burston at
Haaretz fumes in
Boston, from afar: Will someone please explain my America to me?
Is there anyone in America who believes that if the bombing suspects had been native-born, white, loner Protestants, more than a million people would have been placed under a lockdown that verged on martial law?
Is there anyone who truly believes that, had it been a blue-eyed, blonde-locked, Christian-born, American citizen who committed this monstrous bombing and then murdered a policeman in cold blood, that major league baseball and national hockey league games would be canceled, and that the national passenger rail carrier and the nation's premier bus line would suspend service on one of the country's highest profile traffic corridors?
Had the terror suspect not been a Muslim, an immigrant, naturalized, retaining a name that began with three syllables, is there anyone who truly believes that a United States Senator would publicly urge that he be declared an "enemy combatant for intelligence gathering purposes" and that he be denied Supreme Court-mandated Fifth and Sixth Amendment Constitutional rights granted to people arrested in the United States?
Craig Aaron at
The Progressive writes
A Koch Hold on the Tribune and LA Times?:
The Koch brothers reportedly see “the media” as a next phase in their “10-year-strategy” to shift the country toward their political goals of no taxes, no regulations and no unions to interfere with the pursuit of profits. As Harold Meyerson wrote in Wednesday’s Washington Post, that “doesn’t bode well for the kind of fact-based journalism that most American newspapers strive to practice.”
The positive spin on this development is that perhaps the Kochs just want to siphon off cash from the still-profitable newspapers business before it completely dies off. Yes, the upside is that maybe they’re just vulture capitalists picking at the industry’s bones.