William Barber II at The New York Times writes—Trump’s Terrible Choice for Judge:
Among President Trump’s worrisome nominees to the judiciary, perhaps none is as alarming as Thomas Alvin Farr, a protégé of Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina senator, and a product of the modern white supremacist machine that Mr. Helms pioneered.
Mr. Farr, nominated to serve on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, began his career as counsel for Mr. Helms’s Senate campaigns, where he participated in racist tactics to intimidate African-American voters. This alone is reason to reject his nomination, as is his apparent lying on the topic to the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Mr. Farr’s connections to Mr. Helms’s white supremacist causes and political network go much deeper.
Having lived in North Carolina since childhood, I know Mr. Helms’s racist legacy and I hold no doubts that Mr. Farr perpetuates it. [...]
Most recently, Mr. Farr has carried on Mr. Helms’s legacy by helping North Carolina’s Republican-led Legislature create and defend in court discriminatory voting restrictions and electoral districts, which were eventually struck down by numerous federal courts that found them to be motivated by intentional racism. In fact, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit found that the state’s 2013 voter suppression law was aimed at blacks with “almost surgical precision.”
African-Americans seeking to have their rights protected under federal law have much to fear if Mr. Farr takes the bench.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson at The New York Times tries to persuade readers that, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, everything is copacetic at the State Department, and great accomplishments are being made against great evils. And, in a display of seasonal good will, he praises his “patriotic” and “dedicated staff,” which is smaller than when he was confirmed in his job because so many State Department employees have fled for the exits. In I Am Proud of Our Diplomacy, he writes:
I wake up each morning, my first thought is, “How can I and my colleagues at the State Department use diplomacy to prevent people around the world from being killed, wounded or deprived of their rights?” In spite of the challenges, I remain optimistic about the power of diplomacy to resolve conflicts and advance American interests. My confidence comes from the knowledge that our efforts are carried out daily by patriotic and dedicated State Department employees who make sacrifices to serve with patience and persistence and who, by advancing democratic values the world over, are protecting our citizens’ rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Really? That’s really what he thinks when he first wakes up? Hokum and bunkum.
Mark Seddon at The Guardian writes—Trump’s pernicious attempt to starve the UN of cash could yet backfire:
Just ahead of the announcement by the UN that its annual budget is to be cut by 5%, at a time of almost unprecedented global humanitarian need and increasingly bitter and intractable conflicts, the Donald Trump administration revealed that the slash in spending was almost entirely down to its decision to hold back on some $285m in contributions. This is a Trumpian Christmas present, announced as collective punishment for the member states who voted against his incendiary decision to recognise Jerusalem as the “capital of Israel”. [...]
The cuts could have been even more savage, had it not been for the work that secretary general Antonio Guterres set himself in both reforming the organisation and reaching an understanding with the ambitious Haley, whose pronouncements seem designed for a domestic audience and frequently disregard even America’s closest allies. Yet the message from these budget cuts is very clear, and Trump’s effortless prose confirmed it when he told a cabinet meeting: “Let them vote against us. We’ll save a lot. We don’t care.” [...]
It may well be that other member states, such as China, Germany, India and others, further increase their contributions in order to fill the gap. It is entirely possible that the current atmosphere of threat and menace may begin to revive demands by some member states for the UN to consider moving its headquarters from New York to Geneva or Nairobi. [...]
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—The real greatest threat to democracy this year:
[...] A devotion to democracy thus ought to affect how we treat others. We often have to deal with hierarchies, but we should never internalize them. Those at the bottom of formal authority structures see things and know things that cannot be seen from on high. We should, as Pope Francis has said, seek the wisdom available only on the peripheries. We learn from experience — and from the news — that the distributions of virtue, compassion and judgment are not correlated with the distributions of power and wealth.
Democracy, finally, is rooted in two intuitions, about our aspirations to transcendence, which allow us to imagine a better world, and about our proclivities to sin and failure, which require limits on the power any of us can wield. Thus, Reinhold Niebuhr’s aphorism: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
The conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr. once said that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. I no doubt have a higher opinion of the Harvard faculty than Buckley did, but the instinct behind his provocation should stay with us.
Democracy imposes a discipline. It demands that no fortunate group should ever claim, by virtue of its position or its educational attainments, the unchallenged right to impose its will on others. To invoke the late Benjamin Barber’s lovely phrase, the only aristocracy democracy fully sanctions is “an aristocracy of everyone.” It is the one sort of aristocracy worth praying for.
In What a presidential president would have said about his first year, the Editorial Board of The Washington Post fantasizes what Donald Trump’s tweets would be like if he weren’t Donald Trump.
Mark Urban at The Guardian writes—Ice will return but extinctions can't be reversed. We must act now:
[T]he worst effects of climate change will come not from severe weather but from the irreversible loss of species and ecosystems.
Moulded over millions of years by natural selection, the diversity of species on Earth does more than just inspire awe. They are technical marvels and solutions to problems we do not yet know exist.
Scientific evidence now suggests that the Earth has embarked on its sixth extinction crisis, on a par with those executed by extraterrestrial asteroids and geologic upheavals. But this time we are at fault. Most current extinctions ensue from land use and overexploitation, but climate change is now catching up and accelerating these risks.
A couple of years ago I began obsessively scanning thousands of scientific papers for extinctions predicted from climate change. I collected more than half a million predictions including plants and animals from seven continents and the ocean. Surprisingly, I found that species extinctions would not just increase with global warming, but speed up in a rising arc. If we continue emitting current levels of greenhouse gases, climate change could threaten 16% of species – more than a million – by 2100.
Nancy LeTourneau at The Washington Monthly writes—What the Media Needs to Stop, Start, and Keep Doing in 2018:
After a pretty disastrous year in 2016 that is best captured by the Berkman Klein Center report titled: “Partisanship, Propaganda and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 Presidential Election,” the media began to improve their performance in 2017. Over time we witnessed them coming to grips with things like Trump’s habit of lying and name it for what it was rather than hide it in euphemisms. We also saw fewer attempts at mischaracterizations like “bothsiderism” when it comes to being honest about the extremism of Republicans. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t still room for improvement. [...]
Perhaps the biggest failure of the media in 2017 came with the ubiquitous stories about Trump voters. Everyone did them, including NPR, Bloomberg, the New York Times, Politico, the Washington Post and the Associated Press. Many of them published stories repeatedly on this topic.
I understand the curiosity that drove all of this. It is hard to imagine anyone actually voting for Donald Trump—much less sticking with him during his horrendous performance this first year. But the exclusionary focus on one group of voters came at the expense of all others. That probably explains the failure of the reporting in the run-up to the Alabama special election when so many outlets published stories about the lack of enthusiasm among African American voters in that state. There was no familiarity with them, so they didn’t see what was coming.
Jane McAlevey at In These Times introduces her essay by describing two personal instances of sexual predation against her before pointing out how this connects to the prescription she suggests for what ails the labor movement. She writes—What #MeToo Can Teach the Labor Movement:
The central lesson the labor movement should take from the #MeToo movement is that now is the time to reverse the deeply held notion that women, especially women of color, can’t build a powerful labor movement. Corporate America and the rightwing are out to destroy unions, in part, so that they can decimate the few public services that do serve working-class families, including the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and public schools. Movements won these programs when unions were much stronger. It makes sense that unions, and the women’s movement, should throw down hardest to defend and grow these sectors, largely made up of women, mostly women of color, who are brilliant strategists and fighters.
The labor movement should also dispense of the belief that organizing and strikes can’t work. It’s self-defeating. Unions led by Chicago teachers and Philadelphia and Boston nurses, to name a few, prove this notion wrong. The growing economic sectors of education and healthcare are key. These workers have structural power and extraordinary social power. Each worker can bring along hundreds more in their communities.
Another key lesson for labor is to start taking smart risks, such as challenging the inept leadership in the Democratic Party by running its own pro-union rank-and-file sisters in primaries against the pro-corporate Democrats in safe Democratic seats, a target-rich environment. As obvious as it might sound, this strategy is heresy in the labor movement. Women who marched last January should demand that gender-focused political action committees, such as EMILY’s list, use support for unionization as a litmus test for whether politicians running for office will get their support. No more faux feminist Sheryl Sandberg types.
David Dayen at The New Republic writes—Betsy DeVos’s Gut Punch to Defrauded Students:
Imagine a car dealer sold you a lemon. You sue to get your money back. But the judge discovers that you managed to get yourself around most of the time, despite the bum vehicle. You only missed 10 percent of your appointments, so the judge orders that you are entitled to 10 percent of the price of the car.
That’s essentially what Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced last week for students defrauded by for-profit chain Corinthian Colleges. Victims of the corrupt diploma mill will not have their student loans discharged; instead, they will get a portion of relief based on their current income. The more professional ingenuity they showed despite being defrauded by Corinthian, the less money they will get in restitution.
It’s yet another way in which DeVos has acted in favor of the for-profit college industry, which was left for dead after several major companies’ deceptive schemes finally caught up with them. Not only is DeVos shielding the industry from the consequences of those misdeeds, she’s rewriting the rules to legalize those practices.
Corinthian targeted single mothers and returning veterans with high-pressure recruitment, lying about job placement statistics to make enrollment seem like a good bet. Once signed up, Corinthian would pile on tens of thousands of dollars of unanticipated debt and deliver a substandard educational experience. One student alleged that some final exams involved board games and that he got course credit from an “internship” working at a fast-food restaurant. In the end, the useless degrees did not help, and sometimes even hurt, graduates’ job prospects.
Conor Friedersdorf at the Los Angeles Times makes a case for not chewing gum and walking at the same time in his Let's not make 2018 a year of protest. “Resistance” gets quotation marks? Seriously? Focused protests are not a distraction, they invigorate us. Protests certainly haven’t diverted Democrats from victories at the ballot box this year:
Disgust with Donald Trump transformed 2017 into a year of protest. His critics gathered publicly in opposition to the inauguration; to march on behalf of women; to resist a travel ban that targeted Muslims; to insist on the importance of science; to express support for the rights of immigrants who are in the country illegally; and to decry America's withdrawal from the Paris climate accords. Many saw taking to the streets as the best way to express patriotic dissent. And showing up made it easier to organize an infrastructure for ongoing “resistance.”
The displays of opposition were an important civic statement in 2017. But prioritizing street protests in 2018 would be a grave error for Trump critics, as there are more effective and direct actions they can take to change the country's trajectory. Namely, they can work to dominate the 2018 midterms.
The new year will bring the most important off-year elections in many of our lifetimes. As is true every two years, the entire House will be up for reelection.
Hazel Cills at Jezebel writes—Instead of All-Black, Actors Protesting Sexual Harassment Should Just Wear Jumpsuits Painted With Their Salaries:
In case you have not heard, actresses will be protesting sexual harassment at the upcoming Golden Globes ceremony by wearing black. And now, predictably, men want to get in on the protest too, by also wearing black. [...]
There are many, far more useful ways men in Hollywood could protest rampant sexual harassment: calling out harassment when they see it, refusing to work with sexual predators, placing and routinely replacing a piece of duct tape on Matt Damon’s mouth, etc. But if they want to stick to protest fashion on the Globes carpet, why don’t men wear jumpsuits emblazoned with their salaries? [...]
Mark Wahlberg or Tom Hanks publicly disclosing their salaries will obviously not put an end to harassment alone. But if actors and filmmakers want to stand in solidarity with women on the carpet, this is an easy, cheap way to do it. Writer Mary H.K. Choi had the right idea when she tweeted that for “feminist” men who don’t quite know what to do in this moment, salary disclosure is a great place to start.
Colin Gordon at Jacobin writes—The Legacy of Taft-Hartley. Seventy years ago, the Taft-Hartley Act ushered in “right-to-work” laws and imposed draconian restrictions on workers' rights. The labor movement still hasn’t recovered:
The current assault on workers’ rights and labor standards is unrelenting. Federal labor policy has been undermined by the Trump administration’s deregulatory fever and deference to low-road employer interests. In the states, the corporate-inspired attack on public sector unionism has spread from Wisconsin to Iowa and beyond. In January, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Janus vs AFSCME, whose decision will almost certainly allow anti-union public employees to opt out of paying dues and, therefore, evade the costs of negotiating and administering collective bargaining contracts.
But while the ferocity and pace of this legislative and administrative assault is new, its motives and logic are not. Recent efforts to undermine the democratic and associational rights of public sector workers echo and mimic attacks on private sector workers that began seventy years ago, with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in June 1947. [...]
The Taft-Hartley Act pushed for changes on three fronts. In an early manifestation of McCarthyism, the law required union officers under the National Labor Relations Board’s jurisdiction to submit anti-communist affidavits. It tipped the scales in labor disputes by dispensing with the expectation of management neutrality and prohibiting a range of “unfair labor practices” — including jurisdictional strikes, secondary boycotts or pickets, and wildcat strikes. And it opened the door for individual states to outlaw “union security” provisions (which required workers in unionized shops to join and pay dues to the union) through the passage of what became known as “right-to-work” (RTW) laws.
The law sailed through Congress, winning the support of virtually all GOP lawmakers in both chambers, 106 of 177 Democrats in the House, and 20 of 42 Democrats in the Senate. [...]