Jesse McCarthy at The New Republic writes that 'Selma' Ignores the Radical Grassroots Politics of the Civil Rights Movement:
In its rush to enshrine and reconfirm the charismatic male leadership of the movement, [the film Selma] fails to honor the great female fountainheads of that movement, Septima Clark and Ella Baker, and women like Fannie Lou Hamer in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, whose work on voter-registration and literacy, through the Citizenship Schools, were the true incubators of activism and irrigators of the Civil Rights movement. At a time when men still unthinkingly expected the women to take notes as the men talked politics at meetings, Baker, the outspoken guiding spirit of SNCC, proved an indispensable leader, instrumental at every level in the success of Freedom Summer.
What it comes down to is that Selma expresses at every turn the political perspective of the black middle class, which prefers to perceive the civil rights struggle through the lens of individual dignity and negotiation, as opposed to collective urgency and direct action. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, both currents were, and indeed remain, important drivers of change. But it explains the film’s contemptuous handling of any whiff of radical politics. The groundbreaking work of SNCC, for example, is dismissed as hot-headed petulance. An utterly bizarre performance by Nigel Thatch of Malcolm X presents him simultaneously as rakish and emasculated, a potential threat to a good woman, without any trace of a threat to white supremacy; while the film redacts Stokely Carmichael from the record entirely.
Charles M. Blow at
The New York Times writes
Privilege of ‘Arrest Without Incident’:
“Officers found two people who said they were at a stop sign when a woman pulled up in a dark-colored sedan and fired shots into their vehicle, hitting and disabling the radiator. Then more calls reported a woman pointing a firearm at people as she passed them in her car, and that she fired at another vehicle in the same area.”
When police officers came upon the shooter, the shooter led them on a chase. The shooter even pointed the gun at a police officer. […]
According to the paper, the shooter was “taken into custody without incident or injury.”[…]
It’s hard to read stories like this and not believe that there is a double standard in the use of force by the police. Everyone needs to be treated as though his or her life matters. More suspected criminals need to be detained and tried in a court of law and not sentenced on the street to a rain of bullets.
It is no wonder that whites and blacks have such divergent views of treatment by the police. As The Washington Post noted recently about a poll it conducted with ABC News, only about two in 10 blacks “say they are confident that the police treat whites and blacks equally, whether or not they have committed a crime.” In contrast, six in 10 whites “have confidence that police treat both equally.”
Check out additional pundit excerpts below the fold.
Syreeta McFadden at The Guardian writes We declared in 2014 that black lives matter because we saw how often they didn't:
It pains me that, in 2014, in America, we have to publicly affirm that black lives matter. And yet, in 2014, we’ve seen so many examples of when they didn’t.
In February, a Florida jury failed convict Martin Dunn for the killing of Jordan Davis. The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates interviewed Davis’ mother, Lucia McBath, shortly thereafter, and she offered powerful parting words to Coates’ son at the end of that interview. “You exist,” she told him. “You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you. And no one should deter you from being you. You have to be you. And you can never be afraid of being you.”
Paul Krugman at
The New York Times writes
Presidents and the Economy:
This time around, monetary policy really needed help from a temporary increase in government spending, which meant that the president could have made a big difference. And he did, for a while; politically, the Obama stimulus may have been a failure, but an overwhelming majority of economists believe that it helped mitigate the slump.
Since then, however, scorched-earth Republican opposition has more than reversed that initial effort. In fact, federal spending adjusted for inflation and population growth is lower now than it was when Mr. Obama took office; at the same point in the Reagan years, it was up more than 20 percent. So much, then, for fiscal policy.
There is, however, another sense in which Mr. Obama has arguably made a big difference. The Fed has had a hard time getting traction, but it has at least made an effort to boost the economy—and it has done so despite ferocious attacks from conservatives, who have accused it again and again of “debasing the dollar” and setting the stage for runaway inflation. Without Mr. Obama to shield its independence, the Fed might well have been bullied into raising interest rates, which would have been disastrous. So the president has indirectly aided the economy by helping to fend off the hard-money mob.
Last but not least, even if you think Mr. Obama deserves little or no credit for good economic news, the fact is his opponents have spent years claiming that his bad attitude—he has been known to suggest, now and then, that some bankers have behaved badly—is somehow responsible for the economy’s weakness. Now that he’s presiding over unexpected economic strength, they can’t just turn around and assert his irrelevance.
Doyle McManus at the
Los Angeles Times writes
'Selma' and why, half a century later, we're still struggling with the 1960s:
So why are we still arguing over who did what in 1965? In part because half a century later, we're still struggling with the '60s. And we're in for a lot more arguing, because the midpoint of the 1960s was exactly 50 years ago this year.
That's not as arbitrary a marker as it sounds. The year 1965 was, roughly speaking, the hinge between what historian Bernard von Bothmer has called the “good '60s,” the early-decade era of John F. Kennedy and civil rights, and the “bad '60s,” the late-decade slide into domestic chaos.
A long list of anniversaries lies in wait—many of them, like Selma, conspiring to revive old arguments and reopen old wounds.
Half a century later, we're still struggling with the 1960s. It's conflicts, as they say, aren't dead; they're not even past.
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The second half of the '60s saw the escalation of the Vietnam War and the rise of the antiwar movement, mostly nonviolent but occasionally violent. It saw the triumph of the civil rights movement and the rise of black nationalism, but also the Watts riots of 1965 and disturbances in other cities. And in 1968, King and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated.
The sweeping cultural revolution of those years is caricatured as sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, but it also ushered in a new feminism (the National Organization for Women was founded in 1966) and a gay rights movement (New York's Stonewall riots, 1969).
No wonder we're still trying to sort out what it all meant.
John Nichols at
The Nation Mario Cuomo Was So Very Right—Especially on the Death Penalty:
...in three terms as governor of New York, as a champion of liberalism in the face of what conservatives proclaimed to be the “Reagan revolution,” as a keeper of the New Deal and Fair Deal and Great Society faith in a possibility of a more perfect union, as a thoughtful proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment and of reproductive rights, as an early supporter of research and funding of programs to address the HIV/AIDS crisis, as a sometimes lonely defender of social-welfare programs, as an innovative thinker who recognized that economic development did not have to be at odds with environmental sanity, Mario Cuomo was so frequently right that he came to be understood more as a statesman than a politician.
And on one issue, above all others, he was the most rigorously and necessarily right of all the prominent political figures of his time.
That issue was the death penalty.
Michael Mechanic at
Mother Jones There Are Several Thousand Secret Photos of America's Horrific Torture Program. Should Obama Release Them?
You may recall, from the dark days of Abu Ghraib, that there was a batch of photos that was never released—images the Pentagon deemed so inflammatory that they needed to stay under wraps. The ones we saw were disturbing enough: the piles of naked Iraqi prisoners, the soldier giving a thumbs up next to an ice-packed corpse, the prisoners being menaced by dogs. And who can forget that iconic shot of a hooded man (his name is Ali Shalil Qaissi), standing on a box in a shower with wires attached to his fingers—a mock execution. There are as many as 2,100 additional images, according to the ACLU, which sued the government in 2004 demanding their release. President Obama has resisted the legal efforts, noting in a statement that to make the photos public would "impact the safety of our troops." […]
The military struck a similar tone in January 2012, when then Mother Jones reporter Adam Weinstein and senior editor Mark Follman wrote about a YouTube video that showed a group of Marines urinating on enemy corpses in Afghanistan—a pretty clear violation of the Geneva Conventions. "The actions portrayed are not consistent with our core values and are not indicative of the character of the Marines in our Corps," a spokesman said.
Perhaps. Yet whoever trained those men, and whoever trained the guys who traded gore for porn, and whoever designed and oversaw that training failed to make the trainees understand that their unbecoming actions, even in a combat situation, could degrade America's image and endanger the lives of their fellow soldiers as surely as if they'd handed the enemy a crate of AK-47s.
And there's the real problem. Nobody wants to see more horrific images and nobody wants to put people's lives at risk. But the national-security establishment has a record of creating the atmosphere for abuses and then throwing individuals under the bus when those abuses come to light. A new batch of photos, it seems, may be just what we need to confront these seemingly ceaseless failures of leadership.
Larry Summers at
The Washington Post writes
Oil’s swoon creates the opening for a carbon tax:
The case for carbon taxes has long been compelling. With the recent steep fall in oil prices and associated declines in other energy prices, it has become overwhelming. There is room for debate about the size of the tax and about how the proceeds should be deployed. But there should be no doubt that, given the current zero tax rate on carbon, increased taxation would be desirable.
The core of the case for taxation is the recognition that those who use carbon-based fuels or products do not bear all the costs of their actions. Carbon emissions exacerbate global climate change. In many cases, they contribute to local pollution problems that harm human health. Getting fossil fuels out of the ground involves both accident risks and environmental challenges. And even with the substantial recent increases in U.S. oil production, we remain a net importer. Any increase in our consumption raises our dependence on Middle East producers.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at
The Washington Post writes
The conscience of Mario Cuomo:
There will never be another politician like Mario Cuomo, a man shaped by a different age. Yet he taught lessons about racial reconciliation, the role of religion in politics, the purposes of politics itself and— ddly for a politician—humility that will always be fresh.
Cuomo, who died New Year’s Day, was brilliant and engaging but also irascible and terribly sensitive. He was tough and calculating but also, in a curious way, innocent. He was an Italian American Catholic politician from the old neighborhood who refused to sand off all his rough edges. He sought to join his affection for the parochial with an aspiration to the universal.
Jennifer C. Berkshire at
The Progressive writes
There Goes the Neighborhood School:
When the city of Chicago shuttered some fifty neighborhood schools last year, officials used antiseptic-sounding words like “underperformance” and “underutilization.” But visit neighborhoods that bore the brunt of the closings, as I did recently, and you’ll hear that the battle over the city’s schools is about something much larger: the future of the city itself and who gets to live here. […]
Troy LaRaviere, the principal of Blaine Elementary School in the Lakeview neighborhood on the Northside, keeps a running tally of stories like these, not to mention a stack of studies, including one he recently conducted, on charter school performance.
“The data that is emerging paints a very clear picture that [charters] are doing far worse than neighborhood public schools at growing student academic skills,” says LaRaviere, who leads a group of principals critical of the direction of education reform in Chicago, including the expansion of charter schools. “The students in those schools are losing out and the private management companies that benefit from the public dollars that flow into charter schools are benefiting from those students’ loss.”