Henry A. Giroux at TruthOut writes—Gun Culture and the American Nightmare of Violence:
Over 270 mass shootings have taken place in the United States in 2015 alone, proving once again that the economic, political and social conditions that underlie such violence are not being addressed. Sadly, these shootings are not isolated incidents. For example, one child under 12 years old has been killed every other day by a firearm, which amounts to 555 children killed by guns in three years. An even more frightening statistic and example of a shocking moral and political perversity wasnoted in data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which states that "2,525 children and teens died by gunfire in [the United States] in 2014; one child or teen death every 3 hours and 28 minutes, nearly 7 a day, 48 a week." Such figures indicate that too many youth in the United States occupy what might be called war zones in which guns and violence proliferate. In this scenario, guns and the hypermasculine culture of violence are given more support than young people and life itself. [...]
It is impossible to understand the rise of gun culture and violence in the United States without thinking about the maturation of the military state.
Geoffrey Cowan at the Los Angeles Times writes—How Theodore Roosevelt helped prove that a knock-down, drag-out primary is a good way to choose a candidate:
Watching the presidential primary campaign unfold with the use of tawdry comments and language that sometimes seem unworthy of the greatest nation in the world, it may be useful to remember that there was an equally explosive contest featuring Theodore Roosevelt 104 years ago, when the presidential primary process began. There were those in 1912, as there are those today, who worried about the failings of a selection system built on popular democracy. Yet the presidential primary process has served America well in the past, and it almost certainly will serve us well this year too.
In 1912, Roosevelt, who had left the White House in the hands of his close friend and fellow Republican William Howard Taft in 1909, decided to challenge Taft for the party's nomination. [...]
At first Roosevelt did not support presidential primaries. In December, 1911, his supporters helped prevent the Republican National Committee from calling on states to adopt them. But once it became clear that Taft could control a convention where delegates were picked under the old rules, Roosevelt championed the new concept of presidential primaries. His campaign theme was “Let the People Rule.” He advocated controversial ideas and used inflammatory language to attack Taft, exciting crowds but throwing fear into the hearts of the leaders and business interests who still dominated the Republican Party.
Lawrence Summers at The Washington Post writes—Why the Fed needs to prepare for the worst right now:
Policymakers who dismiss market moves as reflecting mere speculation often make a serious mistake. Markets were on to the gravity of the 2008 crisis well before the Federal Reserve was; to the unsustainability of fixed exchange rates in Britain, Mexico and Brazil while the authorities were still in denial; and to the onset of a slowdown or recession well before forecasters in countless downturns.
While markets do sometimes send false alarms and should not be slavishly followed, the conventional wisdom essentially never recognizes gathering storms. [...]
Market signals should be taken especially seriously when they are long-lasting and coming from many markets, as is the case with current indications that inflation will not reach target levels within a decade in the United States, Europe or Japan. Especially ominous are moments when news fails to rally markets as would be expected such as with the U.S. stock market and Friday’s strong employment report or the decline of oil prices in the face of heightened Middle East tensions.
Judith Shulevitz at The New York Times writes—It’s Payback Time for Women:
A COUNTRY that gives every citizen enough cash to live on whether she needs it or not: It’s got to be either a fool’s paradise or a profligate Northern European nation. And lo, in November, the Finnish government proposed paying every adult 800 euros or about $870 a month. Fits of this seemingly irrational generosity, called a universal basic income or U.B.I., are becoming surprisingly common. The Swiss will vote in a referendum on basic income this year. The Dutch city of Utrecht will soon start a basic-income pilot program. Canada’s ruling Liberal Party recently adopted a resolution calling for a similar experiment.
Still, it couldn’t happen here. Or could it? Over the past few years, a case for the U.B.I. has emerged that could make it appealing not just to the poor, who don’t vote in great numbers, but to women, who do.
The feminist argument for a U.B.I. is that it’s a way to reimburse mothers and other caregivers for the heavy lifting they now do free of charge. Roughly one-fifth of Americans have children 18 or under. Many also attend to ill or elderly relatives. They perform these labors out of love or a sense of duty, but still, at some point during the diaper-changing or bedpan cleaning, they have to wonder why their efforts aren’t seen as “work.” They may even ask why they have to pay for the privilege of doing it, by cutting back on their hours or quitting jobs to stay home.
Terry J. Allen at In These Times writes—Trump Bullies, Boasts and Bullshits in Bernie’s Burlington:
Donald Trump held a private party disguised as campaign event on January 7 in a 1,400-seat theater in in Burlington, Vt. Sitting in the audience was like watching blood dry—a convergence of the compellingly grotesque and the mind-numbingly boring. Grotesque, I had expected, but having seen clips of Trump, I anticipated being entertained by his clownish braggadocio and fact-challenged hyperbole.
No such luck. The rambling, disjointed speech he burbled in the heart of Bernie’s base was a exercise in dull, smug narcissism. [...]
Misinformation, deception and lies marked the planning and execution of the event as well as the content. The campaign apparently feared opponents and Bernie supporters might pack the room or get tickets and boycott the show, leaving an embarrassingly empty hall. So to ensure an adequate selection of true-believers, Trump issued 20,000 online tickets— for a 1,400-seat venue. The exponential overbooking created a pre-event line that stretched for blocks. At the theater door, Trump’s minions screened the ticket holders and turned away anyone who admitted not being a supporter or even being undecided.
Sabrina Stevens at The Progressive writes—Let's Make 2016 a Progressive Year for our Schools and Communities:
How can we make 2016 the year we reinvent public education? It’s a tall order. But if we set a few key intentions for our work, we have a shot at making real progress
For starters: let us please, PLEASE not get so caught up in the Presidential race that we ignore state and local elections. That might be hard, given that the 2016 election basically started in 2014, and has only gotten uglier and weirder as the months wear on. But progressives have long had the bad habit of over-focusing on federal and Presidential politics at the expense of down-ticket candidates and the important public officials who work in state and municipal government. This is a problem in all issue areas, but it’s a particularly big deal in education, given the intensely local nature of school governance.
Especially now that the Every Student Succeeds Act has replaced No Child Left Behind as the law of the land, we need to focus on recruiting, developing, and electing local- and state-level officials who are strong advocates for full and fair funding of schools, and for equitable education policies.
The Editors of The Nation write— This Supreme Court Case Could Make All Public Unions ‘Right to Work’—The legal foundations of thousands of public-sector bargaining agreements could soon disappear:
On January 11, the Supreme Court will hear argument on Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a full-bore attack on public-sector unions. The lead Friedrichs plaintiffs, a group of fiercely anti-union California public-school teachers, seek to reverse Abood v. Detroit Board of Education (1977) on First Amendment grounds. Abood has provided the bedrock constitutional analysis and recommended administrative structure for public-sector unionism for nearly 40 years. Its reversal would trigger an earthquake in American labor relations. The legal foundations of thousands of public-sector bargaining agreements, covering millions of workers providing all manner of public services, will disappear. The whole of American public employment, at all levels of government, will become a “right to work” (i.e., right not to pay for service) killing field for unions.
The Court has revisited Abood six times since its first announcement, most recently in last year’s Harris v. Quinn. Strong majorities on the Court have reaffirmed the ruling—five times unanimously—in all of those cases. Every member of the present Court has either authored or joined in at least one of those reaffirmations. But back inHarris, Justice Samuel Alito effectively invited the current challenge: He spent nearly half of his lead opinion attacking Abood on First Amendment grounds before getting to the Court’s decision that it didn’t cover the state-supported homecare workers at issue there.
Michael A. Cooper Jr. at The New Republic writes—The Democratic Party in the South Has Changed for Good—The party has been decimated in the South in the Obama era. But it is rebuilding itself in his image.:
Progressive politics may work in a Seattle or a New York City, but they’re not supposed to win campaigns south of the Mason-Dixon. Southern states voted as one Democratic bloc for almost a century after the Civil War, until the landmark civil rights measures of the 1960s combined with Richard Nixon’s election strategy to coax “the old Solid South into the Republican South,” says William Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Democrats in the South generally responded to this shift by leaning right and picking off conservative voters where they could. Think of centrist politicians like Lloyd Bentsen, Blanche Lincoln, Sam Nunn, or Bill Clinton. But the Blue Dog Democrat has been pushed to the brink of extinction in the era of President Barack Obama, in the South as surely as everywhere else, and a new coalition of unapologetically liberal Democrats like [Charlotte, North Carolina, Mayor Jennifer] Roberts have taken control of their party. They may be nearly powerless outside urban, cosmopolitan areas in the South, but these Democrats believe the demographics are on their side to build a liberal Southern majority in the future.
Alexander Nazaryan at Grist writes—How the huge gas leak is turning California’s Porter Ranch into a ghost town:
Last month, the Paris talks concluded with an accord that would compel — though not force — major polluters like the United States and China to radically curb their greenhouse emissions. “Whatever they agree to in Paris, it’s not enough,” Brownsaid before heading to the summit. He has ambitiously pledged to decrease his state’s greenhouse emissions by 40 percent of 1990 levels by 2030, which he can do only by weaning the state off carbon.
The methane leak in Porter Ranch, though, is an apt demonstration of our complex affair with carbon fuels. The natural gas stored in Aliso Canyon flows to the homes of about 20 million customers in the greater Los Angeles area. So while we contemplate wind farms and solar arrays, we remain married to an antiquated infrastructure that lets us do what we have done for centuries: extracting energy by burning carbon.
Paris, with all its promises, has come and gone. Porter Ranch is still enshrouded in noxious gases.
Lucia Graves at The Guardian writes—Be afraid: why Donald Trump's new campaign ad should terrify you:
When Hillary Clinton finally took him to task over the dangers of calling for a ban on all Muslims, she was dragged through the mud by Trump and the media alike. After claiming in a debate that Isis was using Trump’s call to ban all Muslims as a recruitment tool, and specifically, that videos of The Donald insulting Muslims were already in circulation, Trump demanded an apology when no such video was readily discernible. “Call it a Christmas miracle,” wrote the Daily Beast, “... terrorism experts say no such video exists.” Or call it something else.
Two weeks later news broke that an al-Qaida affiliate had apparently released a new recruitment video featuring Trump’s ban on Muslims. Trump used this as an opportunity to say Clinton lied, because it wasn’t Isis but another terrorist organization using it as a recruitment tool, despite the fact that there is some debate as to whether Clinton was even singling out Isis to begin with.
The more relevant fact is Trump’s positions are being used as a terrorist recruitment tool and almost nobody’s holding him to account for that.