E.J. Dionne at The Washington Post writes With immigration action, Obama calls his opponents’ bluff:
Stay wide awake in the coming weeks. This is a historic moment when all of the divisions, misunderstandings and hatreds of President Obama’s time in office have come to a head. We are in a different place than we were. We are also in a place we were bound to get to eventually.
Obama’s decision to back away from our government’s policy of ripping apart the families of undocumented immigrants has called forth utterly contradictory responses from Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives. It should now be clear that the two sides don’t see the facts, the law or history in the same way.
David Sirota at
Creators Syndicate writes
Journalists Aren’t Covering Local Elections. Our Democracy Is Suffering Because of It.:
On a warm October night toward the end of the 2014 campaign, almost every politician running for a major office here in the swing state of Colorado appeared at a candidate forum in southeast Denver. The topics discussed were pressing: a potential war with ISIS, voting rights, a still-struggling economy. But one key element was in conspicuously short supply: the media.
This was increasingly the reality in much of the country, as campaigns played out in communities where the local press corps has been thinned by layoffs and newspaper closures. What if you held an election and nobody showed up to cover it? Americans have now discovered the answer: You get an election with lots of paid ads, but with little journalism, context or objective facts.
Between 2003 and 2012, the newspaper workforce decreased by 30 percent nationally, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. That has included a major reduction in the number of newspaper reporters assigned to cover state and local politics. Newspaper layoffs have ripple effects for the entire local news ecosystem, because, as the Congressional Research Service noted, television, radio and online outlets often “piggyback on reporting done by much larger newspaper staffs.” Meanwhile, recent studies from the University of Chicago and the Federal Reserve Bank suggest the closure of newspapers can ultimately depress voter turnout in local elections.
Charles M. Blow at
The New York Times writes
Bigger Than Immigration:
Don’t let yourself get lost in the weeds. Don’t allow yourself to believe that opposition to President Obama’s executive actions on immigration is only about that issue, the president’s tactics, or his lack of obsequiousness to his detractors.
This hostility and animosity toward this president is, in fact, larger than this president. This is about systems of power and the power of symbols. Particularly, it is about preserving traditional power and destroying emerging symbols that threaten that power. This president is simply the embodiment of the threat, as far as his detractors are concerned, whether they are willing or able to articulate it as such.
A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll last week found that the public “wants immigration policy along the lines of what President Barack Obama seeks but is skeptical of the executive action.” When The Journal looked at some of the people who “say they want to see a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants—which is beyond what Mr. Obama’s executive order would do—but say they disapprove of presidential executive action,” it found that the group was “overwhelmingly white and more likely to be Republican than not” and some said that they simply “don’t like anything associated with the president.”
You will find more pundit excerpts below the orange thingamabob.
Bruce Ackerman at the Los Angeles Times writes Like the Emancipation Proclamation, Obama's order forces democracy:
Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation provides the foundational precedent for President Obama's executive order on immigrants in the country illegally.
Before Lincoln issued his pronouncement in September 1862, congressional majorities had expressly affirmed that the war effort only aimed “to preserve the Union” without “overthrowing … established institutions” in the rebel states. The proclamation was an act of executive unilateralism, and as Obama has done in his order, Lincoln limited its scope in recognition of this fact. As a result, both proclamations serve only to initiate, rather than preempt, further democratic debate and decision.
Lincoln did not try to free any blacks in the four slave states that remained loyal to the Union. Nor did he even liberate slaves in the Southern areas under federal control. Instead, the proclamation only affected those areas that remained in active rebellion on New Year's Day 1863.
Rachel Luban at
In These Times writes
The United Arab Emirates Guestworker System Is Inhumane. So Is Ours.:
The plight of migrant workers in the United Arab Emirates has made news for the second time this year. [...]
But the similar plight of migrant workers under United States guestworker programs has not garnered such attention. None of these articles mention that the US has its own version of the kafala system.
We, too, grant visas to “guestworkers,” foreign workers who come to the U.S. legally and temporarily, returning to their home countries after their work is finished. The guestworker program for low-skill labor is known as H-2. And H-2 workers’ legal status—like that of many guestworkers—is tied to the employer who sponsored their visa. If they quit or are fired, even in abusive situations, they’re deportable.
It’s an American kafala system—we just don’t call it that.
In the U.S., the practice goes by the bureaucratic name of “non-portability”—the job is not “portable” to another employer. But does it lead to the kinds of abuses rife in the repressive U.A.E.? Perhaps not of the same magnitude. But it does engender abuses of the same class.
Roxane Gay at
The Guardian writes
Bill Cosby and the rape accusers: stop looking away and start believing women:
We should have never ignored the accusations against Bill Cosby (which his lawyer says Cosby “does not intend to dignify”), but it’s difficult to believe something so sinister about a public figure as beloved as Bill Cosby. He gave us Fat Albert, The Cosby Show and A Different World. We ask ourselves, How could a talented comedian—a family man, a philanthropist—also be a serial rapist?
Cosby and other men accused of rape rely on us asking those questions. But those questions are a privilege not accorded rape victims, who have to go to extraordinary lengths to be heard, let alone believed—whether or not the men they are accusing are world-famous and wealthy.
Rolling Stone this week published a harrowing story about Jackie, a young woman at the University of Virginia who offers her account of being brutally gang raped during a party. The last assailant she describes in her story of the hours-long assault was a classmate she recognized, and he hesitated—so one of the other assailants said, “Grab its motherfucking leg.”
That haunts me. It makes me ill. “It.”
Michelle Chen at
The Nation asks
What Will Happen to the Immigrants Left Out of Obama’s Executive Actions?:
Here’s what it is: Obama’s initiative will build on the existing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has since 2012 offered some undocumented youth temporary, renewable reprieve from deportation. A similar protection will be extended to several million undocumented adults, who have children with citizen or green card status, and have at least five years of residency and clean records. More would also gain relief through an expansion of the original Deferred Action to include more childhood arrivals, with no age limit, along with easing the migration of skilled tech-sector workers.
But the president can’t bring about a complete overhaul of the immigration system himself, and millions will be left out of these new measures. Despite the battle cries of Republicans threatening to thwart the plan through procedural countermeasures or lawsuits, opponents can rest assured that the majority of undocumented people will remain without papers, and with nowhere to go.
And while the reprieve will be welcome news for millions, it contains a paradox: young people who were part of the 2012 reprieve, the DACA-mented, will see their parents excluded from the pending relief measures, because the new reforms exclude the undocumented parents of DACA recipients. In other words, the youth who have been on the front lines campaigning for an expansion of their program now face the devastation of their parents being among the millions who the new measures leave behind.
Nathalie Baptiste at
The American Prospect writes
Congresswoman-Elect Mia Love: Personification of GOP Hypocrisy on Immigration:
Although Love claims that her parents came here legally, there are several discrepancies that arise in her story. Her parents entered on tourist visas, which are typically granted for up to six months at the discretion of the immigration officer. This implies that Love’s parents overstayed their visas, became undocumented, and when Love was born, they were able to apply for legal status. If that were the case, then Mia Love is what Republicans pejoratively refer to as an “anchor baby.”
What Love’s parents did to escape Haiti was common in the 1970s and 1980s, and her success can be contributed to her parents immigrating to the United States. One would think that with a story like that, Mia Love would be aggressively campaigning for better immigration laws so that other children of immigrants could be as successful as she.
Instead her hypocrisy is astounding. At a 2012 town hall meeting in Utah, Love sounded indignant that an estimated 60 percent of undocumented immigrants were in the U.S. on expired visas. To prevent undocumented immigrants from entering the country, Love proposes the same old Republican canard of securing the border. On Monday, Love joined Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, at a press conference called to criticize Obama’s planned executive action on immigration. Lee supports a bill that would deny citizenship to children born to undocumented immigrants.
Doyle McManus at the
Los Angeles Times suggests that
A Bernie Sanders candidacy could help Hillary Clinton:
I’m going out on a limb here, but: Bernie Sanders is not going to be our next president. Still, the independent socialist senator from Vermont is sounding more and more like a man who intends to defy the doubters and run. And he could play an important role in the campaign.
Sanders hasn’t formally announced his candidacy; he hasn’t even changed his party registration. (If he runs, it will be in the Democratic primaries.) But he’s doing everything an aspiring candidate needs to do. He’s traveled to Iowa and New Hampshire. He’s signed up (provisionally) a high-powered campaign manager, Tad Devine, who worked on the presidential campaigns of John F. Kerry and Al Gore. He’s buttonholing reporters with even more zeal than usual. And this week, he even submitted to the gentle ridicule of faux conservative Stephen Colbert to win seven minutes of national television time.
“A self-described socialist!” Colbert faux-sneered. “Do you frighten people when you walk around the Capitol? Are they afraid you’re going to take their tractor and give it to the whole village?”
“Hopefully we frighten the billionaire class,” Sanders replied as a youthful studio audience cheered.
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship at
Alternet write
Our Government Has Become a Clearing House for Big Money:
Consider the new report from the watchdog Sunlight Foundation: From 2007 to 2012, the two hundred most politically active corporations in the United States spent almost $6 billion for lobbying and campaign contributions. And they received more than $4 trillion in US government contracts and other forms of assistance. That’s $760 for every dollar spent on influence, a stunning return on investment.
Peter Overby at National Public Radio reported that “Military contractors lead the list of contract recipients, and they hover in the upper ranks of companies with the biggest campaign contributions.” Raytheon, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin – all of them made hefty political donations to Republican campaigns. Not coincidentally, this year the Pentagon is due to spend $163 billion on research, development and procurement.
Then look at who’s expected to be the new Republican chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee – Thad Cochran of Mississippi. Breathlessly, The Washington Post writes, “This could mean additional funding for the Navy to modernize its fleet and potentially benefit contractors such as shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls.” Guess what company describes itself as “the largest manufacturing employer in Mississippi and a major contributor to the economic growth of the state,” not to mention a major contributor this year to Thad Cochran’s re-election campaign? Why, shiver our timbers, it’s Huntington Ingalls.
Paul Krugman at
The New York Times writes
Rock Bottom Economics—The Inflation and Rising Interest Rates That Never Showed Up:
Isn’t the era of rock-bottom economics just about over? Don’t count on it.
It’s true that with the U.S. unemployment rate dropping, most analysts expect the Fed to raise interest rates sometime next year. But inflation is low, wages are weak, and the Fed seems to realize that raising rates too soon would be disastrous. Meanwhile, Europe looks further than ever from economic liftoff, while Japan is still struggling to escape from deflation. Oh, and China, which is starting to remind some of us of Japan in the late 1980s, could join the rock-bottom club sooner than you think.
So the counterintuitive realities of economic policy at the zero lower bound are likely to remain relevant for a long time to come, which makes it crucial that influential people understand those realities. Unfortunately, too many still don’t; one of the most striking aspects of economic debate in recent years has been the extent to which those whose economic doctrines have failed the reality test refuse to admit error, let alone learn from it