Gregory Daddis, a West Point professor of history, writes at the Los Angeles Times, Why war? It's a question Americans should be asking:
The key seems to be to ask more meaningful questions about the difficulties of imposing one's will on others through the use of military force. Much of war is the art of balancing the possible with the acceptable. If our political purpose is stability, security and promoting the spread of American ideals (and economic access), then civilian policymakers and military leaders seemingly need to ask how war can, in fact, further those political goals.
But war has not offered predictability, it has not assuaged our fears of vulnerability, it has not left us with a more stable international environment. And it seems increasingly incapable of deterring future war.
So we come back to that song's question: “War, what is it good for?” And we have to at least consider the song's answer: “Absolutely nothing.”
Tim Radford at
Climate News Network writes
Human handprint marks Australia’s hottest year:
Scientists are fond of saying that it is difficult to pin the blame for any one climate event onto climate change. But they have just made an exception by reporting that many things that happened in Australia in 2013 bore the signature of man-made climate change.
In that one year, Australia recorded its hottest day ever, its hottest month in the history books, its hottest summer, its hottest spring, and its hottest year overall. [...]
“When it comes to what helped cause our hottest year on record, human-caused climate change is no longer a prime suspect − it is the guilty party,” said Dr Sophie Lewis, a paleoecologist at the Australian National University.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at
The Washington Post writes
Why Democrats aren’t getting credit for the economy:
A party controlling the White House could not ask for much more from economic numbers than the Democrats got in Friday’s jobs report, issued a month and a day before the midterm elections. Unemployment fell to 5.9 percent, the lowest it has been since July 2008. The nation added 248,000 jobs, more than the forecasters had projected. What’s not to like?
President Obama, for one, is clearly frustrated that having inherited an economy that was at death’s door, he is getting remarkably little credit for getting it back on its feet.
There are more pundit excerpts beneath the fold.
Paul Krugman at The New York Times laments that the oligarchs' tricksy supply-side economics theory has not been done away with, as he explains in Voodoo Economics, the Next Generation:
Even if Republicans take the Senate this year, gaining control of both houses of Congress, they won’t gain much in conventional terms: They’re already able to block legislation, and they still won’t be able to pass anything over the president’s veto. One thing they will be able to do, however, is impose their will on the Congressional Budget Office, heretofore a nonpartisan referee on policy proposals.
As a result, we may soon find ourselves in deep voodoo. [...]
So why is this happening now? It’s not because voodoo economics has become any more credible. True, recovery from the 2007-9 recession has been sluggish, but it has actually been a bit faster than the typical recovery from financial crisis, despite unprecedented cuts in government spending and employment. In fact, the recovery in private-sector employment has been faster than it was during the “Bush boom” last decade. At the same time, researchers at the International Monetary Fund, surveying cross-country evidence, have found that redistribution of income from the affluent to the poor, which conservatives insist kills growth, actually seems to boost economies.
Mychal Denzel Smith at
The Nation explains Why Voting and Movement Building Go Hand-in-Hand:
Voting can change the makeup of who is in office, but in order for there to substantial change, the people who run for office must accurately reflect the values of the community they represent. That’s where activism, direct action, organizing and movement building come in.
“For all the righteous indignation it inspired,” writes Charles Cobb, a a former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee field secretary, in The Washington Post, “the Ferguson turmoil has become the latest in a series of flash-in-the-pan causes that peter out without inspiring lasting movements for racial justice.”
I have more than a few issues with this assertion. It’s the reason I wrote a few thousands words about the work that a new generation of activists have been doing, before Michael Brown was killed and Ferguson became recognizable shorthand, in organizing and building a movement. Cobb nods to this toward the end of his op-ed, but doesn’t seem to take these young people seriously.
But he also admonishes the residents for their low voter turnout. “Just two generations ago, black Southerners endured arrests and beatings in order to vote,” he writes, “And yet, it seems we’ve already forgotten the immense power of the ballot.” I don’t believe that’s true. Young black people in particular, the ones who showed up in record numbers in 2008, 2010 and 2012, know well the power of the ballot. They also know the limitations. They have watched the past six years unfold, on a national and local level, and understand that voting on its own is not enough. And that’s why they’re in the streets building a movement.
Sady Doyle at
In These Times urges progressives to take a tougher stance in
Abortion Isn’t a Necessary Evil. It’s Great:
Katha Pollitt’s Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights is a deeply felt and well-researched book which argues that abortion, despite what any of its opponents might claim, is a palpable social good. Progressives, Pollitt says, can and must treat abortion as an unequivocal positive rather than a “necessary evil”; there is no ethical, humane way to limit abortion rights. The fact that Pollitt needs to make this argument in 2014, however, seems to indicate that pro-choicers have long been a little too nice for our own good.
Which is something Pollitt herself points out, many times. There are the obvious truisms about abortion ideally being “safe, legal, and rare,” sure. Pollitt also cites Roger Rosenblatt's formulation of “permit but discourage,” which makes it sound like reproductive autonomy is a form of social faux pas, like taking the last slice of pizza at the pizza party. Not criminal, sure, but are you sure you need it?
But the language of apology for abortion has seeped ever deeper into our language. [...]
Progressives have apologized for being right. But we don’t have to. Abortion saves lives, improves lives, and makes for a stronger society. The facts are decisively on our side.
Most profoundly, Pollitt’s book is a call for us all to reclaim and speak out about the truths we know. Personally, I like abortion. I've never needed one. I'm still glad to have the option. I'm glad for the people I've known who got pregnant at the wrong time, with the wrong people, and didn't have their lives ruined by it.
David Sirota at
Alternet writes
Economic Inequality is Much Worse Than Most Americans Believe:
If critics of income inequality are wondering why the growing gap between rich and poor hasn’t been a more potent political issue in the upcoming elections, a new study offers some answers: Americans grossly underestimate this inequality. That's one of the key findings of a survey showing the gap between CEO and average worker pay in America is more than 10 times larger than the typical American perceives.
In the report, Harvard University and Chulalongkorn University researchers analyzed survey data from 40 countries about perceptions of pay gaps between rich and poor. In every country, respondents underestimated the size of the gap between CEO and average worker pay. In the United States, for example, the researchers found the median American respondent estimated that the ratio of CEO to worker income is about 30-to-1. In reality, the gap is more than 350-to-1.
The study also found the median American respondent said the ideal pay gap is about 7-to-1—a lower ideal than respondents in many industrialized countries. Additionally, no major industrialized country has anywhere close to a 7-to-1 pay gap. That ratio is more than seven times lower than the actual gap in social democratic countries like Denmark and Sweden.
In an interview with the Harvard Business Review, one of the researchers who conducted the study said Americans' inaccurate beliefs about the pay gap may be the reason economic inequality hasn't become more of a political issue.
Rachel Cohen at
The American Prospect writes
City Coffers, Not Police Budgets, Hit Hard By the High Cost of Brutality:
As the national conversation around racism and police brutality quickly fades—ramped up briefly in the wake of Michael Brown’s death—U.S. taxpayers remain stuck footing the bills for their local law enforcement’s aggressive behavior. This week alone, Baltimore agreed to pay $49,000 to man who sued over a violent arrest in 2010, Philadelphia agreed to pay $490,000 to a man who was abused and broke his neck while riding in a police van in 2011, and St. Paul agreed to pay $95,000 to a man who suffered a skull injury, a fractured eye socket, and a broken nose in 2012.
In 2013, Chicago paid out a stunning $84.6 million in police misconduct settlements, judgments, and legal fees. Bridgeport, Connecticut, paid a man $198,000 this past spring after video footage captured police shooting him twice with a stun gun, then stomping all over him as he lay on the ground. And in California, Oakland recently agreed to pay $4.5 million to settle a lawsuit a man filed after being shot in the head, leaving him with permanent brain damage. You get the picture.
“That’s why these enormous financial penalties do not seem to actually impact what police do,” said David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in criminal justice issues. “Conceivably, if cities didn’t want this to happen, they could say this will come out of your [police] budget.”The thing is, these steep payments rarely come from the police department budgets—instead they’re financed through the city’s general coffers or the city’s insurance plan. It’s the taxpayer, not the law enforcement agency, who pays the price.
Gary Younge at
The Guardian writes
Carmen Segarra: The Whistleblower of Wall Street:
Carmen Segarra, in the spirit of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden before her, is like the greengrocer who said no. Segarra, a former employee of the New York Federal Reserve, was fired after she refused to tone down a scathing report on conflicts of interest within Goldman Sachs. She sued the Fed over her sacking but the case was dismissed by a judge without ruling on the merits because, he said, the facts didn’t comply with the statute under which she had filed. Segarra is now appealing.
Before she left she secretly recorded her bosses and colleagues, exposing their “culture of fear” and servility when dealing with the very banks they were supposed to be regulating. The Fed is the government agency charged with overseeing the financial sector—a task it singularly failed to achieve in the run-up to the recent financial crisis. What emerges from Segarra’s tapes—released by the investigative website ProPublica—is a supine watchdog wilfully baring its gums before a known burglar so that he may go about his business unperturbed. [...]
The key implications from this exposé are twofold. First, it shows who’s really running the country. The Fed is supposed to be working for the people, not the banks. Goldman is a private institution rescued by public money that has paid billions in settlements after selling dubious products that contributed to a major financial crisis. Segarra is told to show some humility; in reality that is an attribute Goldman would do well to acquire. Instead its chief executive still believes it is doing “God’s work”. So the state genuflects before capital, with those sole task it is to enforce the law deferring to those whose sole task is to make money.
Marjorie E. Wood at
Other Words writes
The Scourge of Siphon-Up Economics:
As the rich get richer, they also disempower workers through union-busting, worker misclassification, wage theft, and lobbying against a minimum wage hike. Why? Because their wealth actually depends on your lack of mobility. For instance, 66 percent of low-wage employers in America are large, wealthy corporations who lobby against increasing the minimum wage.
In this “siphon-up economics,” the rich get richer by draining wealth from the rest of us. The new Census data reveal that since the late 1980s, incomes for the bottom half of Americans have stagnated while those of the top 10 percent have steadily climbed. [...]
As if that weren’t enough, inequality also affects life expectancy. A growing body of research shows that people at the top of the income scale are living longer while those at the bottom are dying earlier. Not surprisingly, more affluent counties tend to have more doctors, better preventative care and information, healthier lifestyles, and higher rates of health insurance coverage.