Tracy Siska at The Guardian writes about homegrown torture in The Chicago police used appalling military interrogation tactics for decades:
The Chicago police department has promised for more than a century to eliminate torture from its interrogation rooms. For more than a century, the Chicago police department has failed to deliver on that promise.
The latest shameful episode is the tale of Richard Zuley, a police officer who brought the tactics he learned in Chicago to Guantánamo Bay and back again, as reported by The Guardian.
Sadly, there is a precedent for Zuley.
For example, in a 2000 case that resulted in a successful federal civil rights lawsuit, a Latino teenager was held for four days chained to a wall in an interrogation room, where he was not only questioned repeatedly, but denied bathroom access and left to soil himself. During the boy’s civil rights trial, officers could only prove that they fed him once during the four days. The teen eventually confessed to a murder he did not commit. After he spent just a few weeks in jail, another suspect was arrested with the murder weapon and confessed shortly after his arrest. How many others locked up have not been so fortunate?
Most infamously, there is highly decorated Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge who, during his 23-year tenure on the force from 1970 to 1993, used the techniques he learned from interrogating the Vietcong as a military policeman in Vietnam on black suspects in Chicago. These techniques included Russian roulette with pistols and shotguns, burning suspects on radiators, suffocation with typewriter covers, beatings with phone books and electric shocks to the ears, nose, fingers, and testicles.
More pundit excerpts can be found below the orange scribble.
David Sirota at TruthDig writes Just Taxing the 1 Percent as Much as We Tax the Poor Would Yield Billions for Cash-Strapped States:
Roads are crumbling, bridges require repairs, schools need upgrades and public pension systems remain underfunded. How can states and cities find the money to address any of these problems? One way could be through their tax codes.
According to a new report, if the rich paid the same state and local tax rate as the middle class, states and cities would have hundreds of billions of dollars more a year in public revenue.
Last month, the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that the poorest 20 percent of households pay on average more than twice the effective state and local tax rate (10.9 percent) as the richest 1 percent of taxpayers (5.4 percent).
Barbara Ellen at
The Guardian explains for those needing to be explained to why
Joe Biden and why touchy-feely men should back off:
Why is there a recurring problem with men and female personal space? One would have thought that “personal” would say it all. But it’s as if some men interpret this as, “Cop a feel, whenever you like.” As was evidenced by the behaviour of US vice president Joe Biden. While Ashton Carter was being sworn in as defense secretary, Biden placed his hands on the shoulders of Carter’s wife, Stephanie, for around 20 unspeakably tense seconds, whispered into her ear, and finally let her go.
While this was going on, Stephanie Carter had The Look that most women would recognise. The look that said: “Sweet Jesus, he’s touching me. Stay calm.” She was visibly cringing, but trapped by circumstances. She could hardly yell, “Don’t touch me!” at the veep during a public ceremony. Then there’s the hideous automatic all-too female slide into coping mode – the inbuilt conditioning to keep the peace. Ms Carter should have been enjoying a special moment in her husband’s career – not enduring the clammy grip of a handsy political silverback, whose position in life suggests that (despite all the apologists for “his generation”) he’s intelligent enough to know exactly what he’s doing.
Robert Reich at
The Huffington Post explains
Why We're All Becoming Independent Contractors:
Uber workers aren't alone. There are millions like just them, also outside the labor laws—and their ranks are growing. Most aren't even part of the new Uberized "sharing" economy.
They're franchisees, consultants, and free lancers.
They're also construction workers, restaurant workers, truck drivers, office technicians, even workers in hair salons.
What they all have in common is they're not considered "employees" of the companies they work for. They're "independent contractors"—which puts all of them outside the labor laws, too.
The rise of "independent contractors" is the most significant legal trend in the American workforce—contributing directly to low pay, irregular hours, and job insecurity.
What makes them "independent contractors" is the mainly that the companies they work for say they are. So those companies don't have to pick up the costs of having full-time employees.
Brian Gilmore at
The Progressive writes
Malcolm X as Relevant Today as 50 Years Ago. Malcolm X was assassinated 50 years ago on Feb. 21, 1965:
In a May 1964 speech, he talked about police brutality in black communities.
“A black man in America lives in a police state,” he said. “He doesn’t live in any democracy. He lives in a police state.”
In February 1965, Malcolm X again responded in a speech in Detroit to the problem of police brutality. This time, he noted the role of the media. “The press is used to make it look like (the black man) is the criminal and (the police force is) the victim,” he stated.
This statement addresses the phenomenon that has occurred repeatedly in the past few years in incidents of police brutality involving black men killed in New York; Ferguson, Missouri; and other cities. [...]
Malcolm X’s place in history continues to evolve. Fifty years ago, more than a life of a great leader was lost. The country also lost a chance to address racial issues that continue to divide the nation.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at
The Washington Post writes
Taking Obamacare for granted:
Will it take the repeal of the Affordable Care Act or its evisceration by the Supreme Court for us to appreciate what it’s done? [...]
Are you a budget hawk? The slowdown in Medicare cost inflation between 2009 and 2012 saved the government $116.4 billion. Burwell is way too careful a wonk to claim that all this was caused by the health-care law, but largely good things have happened — including, by the way, to employment — since it passed. Its critics predicted all sorts of catastrophes. They were wrong.
Yana Kunichoff at
In These Times writes
Who’s Afraid of Chicago’s Progressive Aldermen? Rahm Emanuel, That’s Who:
Now that money is trickling down to some of Chicago’s most tightly contested aldermanic races through the efforts of Chicago Forward, a super PAC created by former Chicago Public Schools communication director Becky Carroll. Super PACs are allowed to take in unlimited donations, but can’t coordinate with or directly contribute to a candidate.
This round of aldermanic races, which culminate in Tuesday’s election, has seen a bevy of candidates that are particularly antagonistic to the status quo of [Mayor Rahm] Emanuel’s administration. Some of the key groups that the mayor has clashed with in the past four years as now running for aldermanic seats—teachers, environmentalists and community organizers.
Chicago Forward is pumping money into 17 of the 50 aldermanic races, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, with an eye to securing the seats of Emanuel’s stalwarts in the City Council, particularly in tight races—and, in a few cases, pushing the more troublesome progressive aldermen out of the picture.
Dick Simpson, a former alderman and now professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) tells In These Times that it’s “pretty clear” Chicago Forward is pumping money into races that worry the mayor’s office.
Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig at
The New Republic What Some Conservatives Call Kids Now: "Human Capital":
How should we support families with children? That question is sure to be a major campaign issue in the 2016 presidential election and beyond. Republican Senator Mike Lee’s expanded child tax credit proposal, which would return up to $2,500 per child to parents, has caused some debate; it’s favored by so-called Reformicons, self-styled reform conservatives. But to make the juicy kid-centered tax credit palatable to fellow conservatives, Reformicons have had to give what is inarguably a welfare program a free-market makeover. To accomplish this, they have decided to re-imagine kids as economic commodities: "human capital."
Human capital is one of the more odious terms in the capitalist lexicon. The phrase advances a couple of key confusions: First, that human value arises from an ability to produce wealth; second, that there is no distinction between labor (the work that humans do) and capital (sources of wealth that passively generate income). Economist Branko Milanovic explains:
If “human capital” and “real” capital are the same thing, how can there be a conflict between labor and capital? If profits and wages are the same thing, why should we fight about distribution? You have your form of capital (which just happens to look like labor), and I have mine, which just happens to look like T-bills and stocks. |
So the term is politically confused and confusing.
Charles M. Blow at
The New York Times writes about Rudy Guiliani's sleazy doubting about President Obama's patriotism in
Who Loves America?:
The concept of forming “a more perfect union” has embedded in it the idea of ambition but not perfection itself. There is room for betterment. America is not static. America is striving.
And sometimes, America requires critique. Jingoism is an avoidance of realism.
You can simultaneously love and be disappointed in the object of your love, wanting it to be better than it is. In fact, that is a measure of love. Honest critique is a pillar of patriotism.
As James Baldwin put it, “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
Paul Krugman at
The New York Times writes
Knowledge Isn’t Power:
Just to be clear: I’m in favor of better education. Education is a friend of mine. And it should be available and affordable for all. But what I keep seeing is people insisting that educational failings are at the root of still-weak job creation, stagnating wages and rising inequality. This sounds serious and thoughtful. But it’s actually a view very much at odds with the evidence, not to mention a way to hide from the real, unavoidably partisan debate.
The education-centric story of our problems runs like this: We live in a period of unprecedented technological change, and too many American workers lack the skills to cope with that change. This “skills gap” is holding back growth, because businesses can’t find the workers they need. It also feeds inequality, as wages soar for workers with the right skills but stagnate or decline for the less educated. So what we need is more and better education.
My guess is that this sounds familiar — it’s what you hear from the talking heads on Sunday morning TV, in opinion articles from business leaders like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, in “framing papers” from the Brookings Institution’s centrist Hamilton Project. It’s repeated so widely that many people probably assume it’s unquestionably true. But it isn’t.