Robert Kuttner at Common Dreams writes Obama’s Trade Agreements are a Gift to Corporations:
But the real intriguing question is why Obama invests so much political capital in promoting agreements like these. They do little for the American economy, and even less for its workers.
The trade authority vote had been bottled up while the Senate Finance Committee Chair, Orrin Hatch of Utah, and his Democratic counterpart, Ron Wyden of Oregon, worked out compromise language in the hope of winning over skeptical Democrats. The measure announced Thursday includes vague language on protections for labor and environmental standards, human rights, and Internet freedoms. Congress would get slightly longer to review the text, but it would still have to be voted on as a package that could not be amended.
Wyden trumpeted these provisions as breakthroughs, but they were scorned by leading labor and environmental critics as window dressing. Lori Wallach, of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, points out that the language is almost identical to that of a 2014 bill that had to be withdrawn for lack of support. Only about a dozen House Democrats are said to support the measure—and many Republicans won’t back it unless more Democrats do.
More pundit excerpts can be read below the fold.
Doyle McManus at the Los Angeles Times writes Democrats' hunt for the white working-class male voter:
“If Democrats can't figure out how to appeal to today's working-class voters, then they don't deserve to lead,” said Stan Greenberg, a political strategist and pollster who helped Bill Clinton win the presidency in 1992.
So they've done polls and held conferences. They've launched a grass-roots campaign to connect with blue-collar workers who aren't union members. White noncollege voters—which is how pollsters define “working class”—have become the Democratic Party's great white whale.
That may seem like a silly hang-up in view of the conventional wisdom that Democrats have a virtual lock on the next few presidential elections by virtue of demographics.
The Editorial Board at the
Los Angeles Times writes
Time to retire the Father Serra statue in Washington?:
Deciding which historical figures to honor is a complicated business. The U.S. Capitol is full of statues of slaveholders and Confederate leaders and killers of Indians, yet we don't automatically remove them because, well, our history is our history, even when it's embarrassing. And just because someone was a product of his (or, less likely, her) time and did things that are unimaginable today doesn't necessarily mean that he or she was entirely without merit or deserves to be wiped out of the historical record like a purged Soviet commissar.
Which brings us to Father Junipero Serra, the Franciscan priest who founded nine missions from San Diego to San Francisco during the 18th century. Should Father Serra still be one of the two people chosen by the state to represent California in National Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol? Serra's statue has been there since 1931, but there's a move afoot to topple him. In fact, a bill has passed the state Senate that would replace him with astronaut Sally Ride.
Its sponsor insists this is about honoring Ride, not dishonoring Serra, but the fact is that many people now view Serra as a religious fanatic whose brutal mission system mistreated native peoples, converted them to Catholicism under duress and nearly eradicated several tribes entirely. Others, however, call that a caricature and point to Serra's role building the missions, often protecting native people from soldiers and settlers, and helping to create California as we know it. Does the good outweigh the bad? Should we remove people from our pantheon as our values evolve, or stick with our flawed but foundational leaders?
Jess Zimmerman at
The Guardian writes
Screw leaning in. It's time to slam the door in Silicon Valley's face:
Women in tech have been told to lean in, back off, be bigger blowhards and simultaneously let others shine. But by far the most inspiring—and probably the most effective—piece of advice is the one found on the otherwise rather mysterious new website tableflip.club: “Fuck that, we’re done. It’s not us, it’s you.”
Meaningful change, the anonymous woman behind the site told me over email, requires not just tweaking but reinvention from the top down: “It’s virtually impossible to change a sick system without being the one in charge.”
You can’t destroy the master’s house, it seems, when the master’s a tool. [...]
What makes her campaign so novel is that it applies the language and techniques of political activism to something that’s been treated as a business problem. Many self-help books and workshops designed to support women at work actually place the onus of responsibility on them, encouraging women to brag more but promise less, to be more assertive and less aggressive.
David Moberg at
In These Times writes
Fast Food Workers in 236 Cities Pull Off Largest Strikes Yet as Other Low-wage Workers Join Fight:
Organizers claimed that it was the largest protest by low-wage workers in U.S. history. And it may very well rank as one of the broadest global worker protests ever undertaken against multinational corporations—one reinforced by recent investigations and lawsuits in Europe against the company for violations of labor, health, safety, tax and other laws.
With its intense public relations campaign, the campaign amplifies the actions of fast food workers—some of whom walk off their assigned shifts as in a traditional strike. For brand-sensitive consumer product companies, many organizers believe, such bad publicity can cost companies greatly—and potentially open up new organizing possibilities.
These protests have also changed the political climate, both locally and nationally. Seattle and Sea-Tac in Washington and San Francisco have raised their minimum to $15 an hour. The same change may be possible sometime soon in both Los Angeles and the District of Columbia. In Chicago, politically embattled Mayor Rahm Emanuel agreed under political pressure to raise the minimum to $13 over several years—far above what he would have contemplated a short while ago. The movement is likely to keep pressure over the coming year on Democratic candidates, even presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton, to advocate the higher pay levels.
Helen Lewis at
The Guardian takes up an issue that Daily Kos feature writer Susan Grigsby wrote about in
Freeping the Hugos. Lewis's piece is titled
If only the sci-fi writers who hijacked the Hugo awards had the wit to imagine a world beyond the Good Old Days. A
Guardian editor writes in a subhead preface: "A culture war in a universe populated with orcs and busty maidens might seem absurd. But just like Gamergate, this storm in a dragon-shaped teacup is a vital sign that opponents of cultural diversity are still determined to preserve their grip on power":
If you were going to build a world, there are a million ways you could make it strange and captivating. Throw in some elves, a mermaid, a few robot monks; dream up a land where dinosaurs still exist or the Nazis won the second world war.
But for some science fiction and fantasy fans, none of these riches of the imagination are enough: the alternate universe they most crave is the Good Old Days. SFF is in the grip of its own culture war, with a group of authors suggesting that the recent success of female and non-white writers is proof that political correctness has spread its tentacles so far that it is now ruining stories that include actual tentacles. Like many culture wars, the specific details – orcs! busty maidens! angry bloggers with baroque facial hair! – make it seem faintly absurd, but the underlying arguments are vital. We shape our culture and it shapes us, and the struggle for an artistic voice is part of the struggle to be seen as fully human.
The sticking point is nominations for the Hugos, the genre’s best-known awards, which will be handed out in August. Anyone who pays $40 (£27) to attend the science-fiction convention Worldcon can nominate up to five of their favourite books in each category for a Hugo.
Amy Goodman at
TruthDig writes
Open Veins, Healing Wounds in Latin America:
And now, a piece of that history is being rewritten, between the United States and Cuba. President Obama has sent a State Department report to Congress, which recommends that Cuba be removed from the official U.S. government list of nations that sponsor terrorism. The peace group CODEPINK applauded the move, saying in a statement, “The infamous U.S. terror list includes only three other nations: Iran, Sudan, and Syria and curiously omits North Korea. Many people around the world found it hypocritical for the United States to single out Cuba while ignoring support for terrorism by U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt and Israel, especially since Cuba is known for exporting doctors, musicians, teachers, artists, and dancers—not terrorists.” [...]
The U.S. embargo against Cuba, one of the most enduring and punishing relics of the Cold War, remains in place, however. This central pillar of a half-century of hostile U.S. policy toward Cuba is increasingly unpopular here. The U.S. business community is tired of losing out on opportunities that are enjoyed by investors from Canada, Europe, Japan and China. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce hailed President Obama’s moves to normalize relations. Businesses like Facebook and Airbnb are in Cuba and planning on expanding, as soon as it is legal to do so. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said recently, “Our Cuba policy, instead of isolating Cuba, was isolating the United States in our own backyard.” And President Obama, when announcing his intention to normalize relations with Cuba last December, admitted, “When what you’re doing doesn’t work for 50 years, it’s time to try something new.”
E.J. Dionne Jr. at
The Washington Post writes
Can the GOP learn from California?
Jim Brulte, California’s Republican state chairman, has sobering but useful words for his party’s 2016 candidates now focused on winning over a homogenous and very conservative primary electorate.
E.J. Dionne writes about politics in a twice-weekly column and on the PostPartisan blog. He is also a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a government professor at Georgetown University and a frequent commentator on politics for National Public Radio, ABC’s “This Week” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.” View Archive
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If they don’t learn from what happened to the GOP here, they may doom themselves to repeating its decidedly unpleasant experience.
“California is the leading edge of the country’s demographic changes,” Brulte said in an interview. “Frankly, Republicans in California did not react quickly enough to them, and we have paid a horrible price.”
Charles M. Blow at
The New York Times writes
Has the N.R.A. Won?:
It is now fair to ask whether the National Rifle Association is winning — or has in fact won — this era of the gun debate in this country.
Gun control advocates have tried to use the horror that exists in the wake of mass shootings to catalyze the public into action around sensible gun restrictions. But rather than these tragedies being a cause for pause in ownership of guns, gun ownership has spiked in the wake of these shootings.
A striking report released Friday by the Pew Research Center revealed that “for the first time, more Americans say that protecting gun rights is more important than controlling gun ownership, 52 percent to 46 percent.”
Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig at
The New Republic writes
America's Political Obsession With the "Middle Class" Hurts Workers:
If you hadn’t noticed, Hillary Clinton has officially embarked upon her 2016 presidential campaign. For the next 18 months, we’ll hear her appeal to American voters: her experience, her passion, and her goals. But for the moment, her campaign is ostensibly based on meeting the needs of the people she calls “everyday Americans,” a sturdy, meaningless replacement for that tired catchall: “middle class.” “Everyday Americans” removes political discussion even further from a consideration of class, which presents trouble for those among the working class and smooth sailing for those at the top. (And “middle class” had already done a fine job of that anyhow.) [...]
On one hand, it’s refreshing that the Clinton campaign chose not to use "middle class" in its rollout video—the term doesn’t mean anything. A recent Pew Survey found that as many as half of all Americans describe themselves as middle class, with another 29 percent describing themselves as lower middle class; 11 percent would call themselves upper middle class. Only a scant 1 percent of respondents refer to themselves as upper class, while 10 percent identify as lower.