E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes 50 years later, Selma’s struggle is not over:
“Where Do We Go From here: Chaos or Community?”
The title of Martin Luther King Jr.’s last book, published in 1967 after Selma and after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, poses a perennially appropriate question — about our country’s struggle over race, of course, but also about our larger quest for justice.
It is much better than the question President Obama rightly scorned on Saturday as he honored the 50th Anniversary of Selma’s Bloody Sunday in one of the most powerful speeches of his presidency. To ask if our current struggles, in Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere, suggest that, “with respect to race, little has changed in this country” would sound absurd to those who lived through the oppression of the past.
Neither the demonstrators nor the police who pummeled them as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 could have imagined that in 2015, an African American president would be leading the ceremonies memorializing the moment. They would have been just as astonished that the states of the Old Confederacy now send one African American to the Senate and 19 to the House, including John Lewis, whose beating on the bridge marked the beginning of his career as a national treasure.
Charles M. Blow at
The New York Times writes
Race, History, a President, a Bridge:
The president had to bend the past around so it pointed toward the future. To a large degree, he accomplished that goal. The speech was emotional and evocative. People cheered. Some cried.
And yet there seemed to me something else in the air: a lingering — or gathering — sense of sadness, a frustration born out of perpetual incompletion, an anger engendered by the threat of regression, a pessimism about a present and future riven by worsening racial understanding and interplay.
To truly understand the Bloody Sunday inflection point—and the civil rights movement as a whole—one must appreciate the preceding century.
More pundit excerpts can be found below the fold.
Melanne Verveer and Mayesha Alam at The Guardian write Women's equality isn't a zero sum game. It's vital for peace and prosperity:
There is a plethora of data which demonstrates that women’s economic participation grows economies, creates jobs and builds inclusive prosperity. As essential as women’s equality is for growth, it is often stymied by discriminatory laws, customs, and structural barriers that restrict women from full participating in the formal economy. In no country is the gender equality gap completely closed.
In the United States, women still do not receive equal pay for equal work. The pay gap has barely changed in a decade, it exists in nearly every occupation and it is exacerbated for women of color and older women. The lack of paid maternity leave makes it difficult for women to have children and also work outside the home. The resulting loss of income hurts families and the larger economy.
The international community has acknowledged the essential role that women play in peace and prosperity, which is particularly evident in conflict zones. Secretary of State John Kerry noted, “Countries that value and empower women to participate fully in decision-making are more stable, prosperous and secure. The opposite is also true. When women are excluded from negotiations, the peace that follows is more tenuous. Trust is eroded, and human rights and accountability are often ignored”.
Yasmin Alibhai Brown at
The Independent writes
This isn’t an anti-feminist backlash – it’s a brutal war on women without rules:
My husband says a global war is being waged on women. He is right. What is going on in the East, West, South and North cannot be attributed to “the backlash” or a new “masculinism” or a reactionary fight back. It is a brutal war without rules or redress, beyond the reach of international laws or institutions. [...]
Wherever you look, women and girls are not safe, not thriving. Females are subjugated and violated in African, Asian, Arab, East European and Central Asian countries. Democracy has not tamed barbaric men. Child rape, FGM, forced marriages, honour killings, abductions are rife in the developing world. And are imported into the West: sickening, but true.
In the West, where gender equality has improved, women are still discriminated against and also violated. Worryingly, the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights found that better gender parity increased violence against women. Nearly 50 per cent of females report physical and sexual assaults in Sweden, Denmark and Finland, where equality is embedded in the culture. The UK has the fifth-highest incidence—44 per cent.
Danny Vinik at
The New Republic writes
Hillary Clinton Is Not Ready for Prime Time:
Clinton herself isn't speaking. As a still-unofficial presidential candidate, she doesn't feel compelled to answer questions about this latest damaging report. But she should—because it’s starting to appear that Clinton is far less prepared for a presidential run than anyone expected.
First, she made multiple gaffes about her own wealth, saying her family was “dead broke” after Bill Clinton left office. At the same time, she has given numerous speeches for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And over the past few weeks, the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post reported in separate investigations that the Clinton Foundation had accepted donations from foreign countries both during and after her time as secretary of state. Many of those countries, like Saudi Arabia, do not have stellar records on human rights.
For a would-be presidential candidate with her deep experience in Washington, that’s a lot of unforced errors. The foundation shouldn’t have accepted donations from foreign countries so that no one could ever accuse Clinton of being influenced by that money. She should have stopped giving paid speeches a long time ago. And she should have used a government email address at the State Department. These should all be easy decisions to make, and yet Clinton got them all wrong. (And, in the case of the paid speeches, continues to get wrong.)
Jonathan Freedland at
The Guardian laments that
Climate activism is doomed if it remains a left-only issue:
In all those sci-fi horror stories foretelling the end of the world, the imagined reaction was never boredom. Panic and hysteria, yes. Sex with strangers, most certainly. We could picture all that at the moment doomsday loomed. But inertia, inattention and a shrugging desire to turn over to the other channel—well, HG Wells never foresaw that.
Yet that is the collective reaction of our species to the warnings that we are frying our planet. People barely discuss climate change. Research shows that most have never mentioned it outside their immediate family; one in three have never talked about it all. When asked to list the issues that matter most, voters put global warming at or near the bottom of the league – and that’s only if prompted. Most wouldn’t even think of it. Faced with a climate catastrophe, our response is catatonia. [...]
But it is an uphill struggle. For the media, climate change is Kryptonite. It fails to tick almost every one of the boxes that defines a story. For one thing, it’s not new: it’s a perennial part of the background noise of 21st-century life. If John F Kennedy had two in-trays on his desk, one marked “urgent,” the other “important”, climate change falls into what the media regard as the wrong category. It’s important but doesn’t feel urgent.
David Sirota at
TruthDig writes
Technology Does Not Guarantee Transparency:
In theory, the changeover from paper to email should make government more transparent. The cost of archiving documents should be lower, because data can be housed on relatively small hard drives rather than in spacious warehouses. Likewise, the time expense of retrieving that data should be reduced, because it can be obtained through a few keystrokes rather than a tedious search of file cabinets.
Consequently, open records requests should be far easier to fulfill, because electronic correspondence and memos are keyword searchable. Yet two New York politicos are showing that the era of Big Data does not necessarily mean the public gets a better view of its government.
The first is Hillary Clinton, the Empire State’s former senator. According to reports this week in The New York Times and Associated Press, Clinton avoided using a government email address as U.S. secretary of state, instead conducting State Department business through a personal account on her own private server. The Times notes that “the practice protected a significant amount of her correspondence from the eyes of investigators and the public.” [...]
At least Clinton’s emails may still exist somewhere, and could be made public if she and the State Department choose to release them. The same cannot necessarily be said for emails from the New York state government, thanks to Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Patricia J. Williams at
The Nation helps us
Meet the Politicians Trying to Bury America’s Past. [Extra paragraph breaks added for readability]:
The planet is aflame with the killing of messengers. We can barely keep score of the assaults on memory: from Mosul to Moscow to Dresden to Dhaka, the destruction proceeds apace—of ancient monuments, scientific archives and schools, of journalists as well as journalism itself. We, the witnesses, expend a great deal of breath and ink promising to “never forget.” Yet both globally and locally, in ways large and small, there is huge resistance to even the smallest reminders of injury: no one wants to talk about trauma or privilege as the invisible distributors of public costs and private benefits today. No one wants to bring it home.
In the United States, there has emerged an alarming trend of officially sanctioned oblivion. The most jaw-dropping example was Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attempted removal of the words “search for truth” from the 100-year-old mission statement of the state university system. Walker also made news when a BBC moderator asked him if he believed in evolution. “I’ll punt on that one,” he said. “I am going to leave that up to you.” Leaving it “up to you” is also what Rand Paul would do with public-health programs like measles vaccinations: “Parents own the children,” he un-reasoned.
The board of governors of the University of North Carolina recently eliminated the Center on Poverty, Work & Opportunity; the Center for Biodiversity; and the Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change. (Also targeted, but hanging on for now, are the Carolina Women’s Center, the UNC Center for Civil Rights and the UNC Institute on Aging.)
Legislators in Arizona have actually banned outright Latin American studies from public-school curriculums. And the Kansas Board of Regents has “reserved the right” to fire any employee in the system, including tenured professors, if they publish anything on social media that is “improper,” “impairs harmony….among co-workers” or is “contrary to the best interests of the employer.”
In Oklahoma, State Representative Dan Fisher pushed a bill through the legislature to slash public funding for Advanced Placement history classes, fearing that they are neither “positive” nor Christian enough. His objection was not that the curriculum was inaccurate, but that the facts were such a drag. (He wants AP history to be inspiring—all about American exceptionalism! And the Ten Commandments! Or, as Rudolph Giuliani instructed President Obama: “I’m happy for him to give a speech where he talks about what’s good about America and doesn’t include all the criticism.”)
Peter Beinart at
Haaretz takes on Netanyahu's speech in
Sorry, Bibi: Iran is bad, but it is no Amalek, Haman or even Nazi Germany:
For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel always faces the same enemy. Call it Amalek, call it Haman, call it Nazi Germany – it seeks the same thing: The destruction of the Jewish people. [...]
So it was in this week’s speech to Congress. Netanyahu started by comparing Iran’s regime to Haman, Amalek’s genocidal heir from the Book of Esther, and ended by comparing it to Nazi Germany. “The days when the Jewish people remained passive in the face of genocidal enemies,” he declared, “those days are over.”
Netanyahu did not invent this way of thinking. From the beginning of the Hebrew Bible to the end, Jewish texts speak of an eternal, implacable enemy: Esau, Amalek, Agag, Haman. On Tisha B’Av, Jews link the catastrophes of our history – from the destruction of the Temples to the beginning of the First Crusade to the Expulsion of Jews from Spain – by insisting they occurred on the same day. And, of course, less than a century ago, the mightiest power in Europe did try to exterminate the Jewish people – and succeeded in butchering one-third.
But Jewish tradition also warns against allowing analogies with the past to obscure our understanding of the present. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks recently noted, Maimonides insisted that since the nations Jews fought in biblical times no longer exist, we cannot identify any contemporary nation with Amalek. (Or, by implication, with Amalek’s heir, Haman).
In his speech to Congress about Iran, Netanyahu violated that tradition. And he violated the obligation of any wise leader: To see current foes not as a facsimile of past ones, but as they really are.
The Editorial Board of the
Los Angeles Times concludes
If not Congress, Obama should reject bill on concealed-weapon permits:
California has some of the nation's toughest gun-control laws, but proposed legislation in Congress would force the state to let people with concealed-weapon permits issued elsewhere carry their guns here. The Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2015 would be bad law and bad policy, and if it passes—which it very well could— President Obama ought to add it to his growing list of bills to veto.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), one of the bill's main backers, compares a concealed-carry permit to a driver's license. “If you have a driver's license in Texas, you can drive in New York, in Utah and other places, subject to the laws of those states,” Cornyn said. Why, he asks, shouldn't the same be true for guns?
But that's an inapt comparison. Guns have a unique and troubling place in American society, and the rules that govern them differ significantly from state to state.
Paul Krugman at his blog rather than his column in
The New York Times busts some right-wing myths in
Slandering the 70s. Some evidentiary charts are included:
I noted yesterday that back in 2009 there was a real division of opinion among leading Republicans: would Obama and Bernanke deliver Weimar-level inflation, or merely 70s-type stagflation?
One thing I neglected to mention, however, is that the 1970s the right predicted would come back bore little resemblance to the actual decade. Yes, the US economy was troubled in that era. But the performance wasn’t nearly as bad as later legend had it, especially when we consider the incomes of middle-class families. Furthermore, the preferred right-wing narrative about why the 70s were worse than the 60s has absolutely no empirical support.