Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes A New Age of Activism:
There seems to be a new age of activism rising. From Occupy Wall Street, to the “Stop Watching Us” march against government surveillance, to the Moral Monday protests, to the People’s Climate March, to the recent nationwide protests over the killings of men and boys of color by police, there is obviously a discontent in this country that is pouring into the streets.
And yet much of it confounds and frustrates existing concepts of what movements should look like. Much does not fit neatly into the confines of conventional politics or the structures of traditional power.
It’s often diffuse. It’s often organic and largely leaderless. It’s often about a primary event but also myriad secondary ones. It is, in a way, a social network approach to social justice, not so much captain-orchestrated as crowd-sourced, people sharing, following and liking their way to consensus and collective consciousness.
Candida Moss and Joel Baden at the
Los Angeles Times discuss
Pope Francis' woman problem:
At first, it was easy to overlook. With all of his statements about caring for the poor, the disabled and immigrants, and all the fanfare surrounding his famous “Who am I to judge?” proclamation, Pope Francis seemed like a breath of fresh air for a church stuck resolutely in the past. The fact that he never commented on the long-standing marginalization of women in the Catholic Church, and asserted quite plainly that there would be no ordination of women, did nothing to dampen progressive enthusiasm for the new pope. There has been a hopeful sense that he would get around to it eventually.
He hasn't, however, and there is reason to question whether he ever will. Instead of a more compassionate and understanding take on the standing of women in the church, Francis has repeatedly embraced the traditional Catholic view that a woman's role is in the home.
Ten days ago, Pope Francis organized and addressed an interfaith colloquium on the subject of “The Complementarity of Man and Woman in Marriage.” The use of the doctrinal term “complementarity” signals the conservative underpinnings of Francis' views on marriage. The religious teaching of complementarity holds that men and women have very different roles in life and in marriage, with men outranking women in most areas. Although Francis did acknowledge that complementarity could take “many forms,” he nonetheless insisted that it is an “anthropological fact.”
More pundit excerpts can be found below the fold.
The fall-out over Rolling Stone's failure to properly vet its story about Jackie, the young woman who said she was gang-raped in a fraternity at the University of Virginia, has collected a lot of commentary, some of it grotesque and a boost for the worst elements among men's rights activists. Here are excerpts from two of those commentaries.
Margaret Talbot at The New Yorker writes Reporting on Rape:
Last month, Rolling Stone ran an article about an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house, based on interviews with a student identified only as “Jackie.” It now appears that key details of the story, reported by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, may not be true. Other journalists—notably, my friend Hanna Rosin and Allison Benedikt, at Slate, and Paul Farhi, Erik Wemple, and T. Rees Shapiro, at The Washington Post—raised doubts about the reporting late last month, but Rolling Stone dismissed them. Then, on Friday, the magazine issued a statement saying, “In the face of new information reported by the Washington Post and other news outlets, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account.” (An earlier version of the statement had emphasized the magazine’s trust in Jackie, and regretted that it had been “misplaced”—wording that seemed to settle too much responsibility for the story’s shortcomings on Jackie and not enough on the reporter or her editors.) Rolling Stone’s statement did not enumerate the discrepancies, but the Post did. [...]
Neither “Drew,” the central figure the Post tracked down, nor any of the other men at the fraternity party appear in the article outside of Jackie’s recollections of them. We don’t read about them denying the charge, or unwillingly lending support to it, or complicating or corroborating or casting doubt on Jackie’s account in any of the ways they might have. That makes for a remarkably weak piece of journalism, and an enormously frustrating situation. If this story does turn out to be largely false, it will do real damage to the important new movement to crack down on sexual assault on college campuses. “One of my biggest fears with these inconsistencies emerging is that people will be unwilling to believe survivors in the future,” Alex Pinkleton, a friend of Jackie’s who survived a rape and a rape attempt at U.V.A., said to the Post. “However, we need to remember that the majority of survivors who are coming forward are telling the truth.” She went on, saying, “While the details of this one case may have been misreported, this does not erase the somber truth this article brought to light: rape is far more prevalent than we realize, and it is often misunderstood and mishandled by peers, institutions, and society at large.” She’s exactly right. [...]
More than a decade ago, I wrote about the McMartin preschool case, and other satanic ritual child abuse accusations that turned out to be false. Back then, the slogan many supporters of the accusations brandished was, “Believe the Children.” It was an antidote to skepticism about real claims of child abuse, just as today, “Believe the Victims” is a reaction to a long history of callous oversight of rape accusations. “Believe the Victims” makes sense as a starting presumption, but a presumption of belief should never preclude questions. It’s not wrong or disrespectful for reporters to ask for corroboration, or for editors to insist on it. Truth-seeking won’t undermine efforts to prevent campus sexual assault and protect its victims; it should make them stronger and more effective.
Alyssa Rosenberg at
The Washington Post writes
The best way to respect sexual assault survivors is to get their stories right:
Bruce Shapiro, the executive director of the Dart Center, emphasized that vigorous reporting does not have to trade off with sensitivity to victims of sexual assault. [...]
“I do think that reporters can be vulnerable, empathetic reporters can be vulnerable to thinking that asking tough questions automatically re-traumatizes sources,” he told me. “There’s a difference between distress and actual trauma. Distress is short-term. Trauma is really damaging to someone in the long run. There’s not a lot of evidence that verifying a story is going to re-traumatize someone.”
In the end, he suggested, “I think it would be a mistake to distract from the core issue, which is why this story’s so emotional and so powerful, which is the enormous problem of sexual assault on college campuses and the documented inadequacy of response by university administrations. The journalistic tragedy would be if we stopped looking at these stories, or stopped looking at the University of Virginia.”
Paul Krugman at
The New York Times writes
Recovery at Last?
Last week we got an actually good employment report—arguably the first truly good report in a long time. The U.S. economy added well over 300,000 jobs; wages, which have been stagnant for far too long, picked up a bit. Other indicators, like the rate at which workers are quitting (a sign that they expect to find new jobs), continue to improve. We’re still nowhere near full employment, but getting there no longer seems like an impossible dream. [..]
Just to be clear, I’m not calling the Obama-era economy a success story. We needed faster job growth this time around than under Mr. Bush, because the recession was deeper, and unemployment stayed far too high for far too long. But we can now say with confidence that the recovery’s weakness had nothing to do with Mr. Obama’s (falsely) alleged anti-business slant. What it reflected, instead, was the damage done by government paralysis—paralysis that has, alas, richly rewarded the very politicians who caused it.
David Sirota at
In These Times writes
Wall Street to Workers: Give Us Your Retirement Savings and Stop Asking Questions:
If you are a public school teacher in Kentucky, the state has a message for you: You have no right to know the details of the investments being made with your retirement savings.
That was the crux of the declaration issued by state officials to a high school history teacher when he asked to see the terms of the agreements between the Kentucky Teachers’ Retirement System and the Wall Street firms that are managing the system’s money on behalf of him, his colleagues and thousands of retirees.
The denial was the latest case of public officials blocking the release of information about how billions of dollars of public employees’ retirement nest eggs are being invested. Though some of the fine print of the investments has occasionally leaked, the agreements are tightly held in most states and cities. Critics say such secrecy prevents lawmakers and the public from evaluating the propriety of the increasing fees being paid to private financial firms for pension management services. [...]
The denial from Illinois pension officials followed a decision earlier this year by Rhode Island General Treasurer Gina Raimondo, a Democrat, to reject a newspaper’s open-records request for information about state pension investments. The treasurer's office argued that financial firms have the right to “minimize attention” around their compensation. Last week Raimondo, who is now Rhode Island's governor-elect, held a closed-door meeting of the state investment commission to review the state’s $61 million investment in a controversial hedge fund.
Harold Meyerson at the
Los Angeles Times takes a look at changing conditions in
Labor's new reality—it's easier to raise wages for 100,000 than to unionize 4,000:
ltingly, with understandable ambivalence, the American labor movement is morphing into something new. Its most prominent organizing campaigns of recent years — of fast-food workers, domestics, taxi drivers and Wal-Mart employees — have prompted states and cities to raise their minimum wage and create more worker-friendly regulations. But what these campaigns haven't done is create more than a small number of new dues-paying union members. Nor, for the foreseeable future, do unions anticipate that they will.
Blocked from unionizing workplaces by ferocious management opposition and laws that fail to keep union activists from being fired, unions have begun to focus on raising wages and benefits for many more workers than they can ever expect to claim as their own. In one sense, this is nothing new: Unions historically have supported minimum wage and occupational safety laws that benefited all workers, not just their members. But they also have recently begun investing major resources in organizing drives more likely to yield new laws than new members. Some of these campaigns seek to organize workers who, rightly or wrongly, aren't even designated as employees or lack a common employer, such as domestic workers and cab drivers.
Henry A. Giroux at
TruthOut writes
State Terrorism and Racist Violence in the Age of Disposability: From Emmett Till to Eric Garner:
The larger reasons behind Eric Garner's execution seem to be missed by most commentators. The issue is not simply police misconduct, or racist acts of police brutality, however deadly, but the growing use of systemic terror of the sort we associate with Hannah Arendt's notion of totalitarianism that needs to be explored. [...]
The murder of Emmett Till, the killing of the four young black girls, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair, in the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the killing by four officers of Amadou Diallo, and the recent killings of countless young black children and men and women, coupled with the ongoing and egregious incarceration of black men, in this country are not isolated expressions of marginalized failures of a system. They are the system, a system of authoritarianism that has intensified without apology.
Rather than being viewed or forgotten as isolated, but unfortunate expressions of extremism, these incidents are part of a growing systemic pattern of violence and terror that has unapologetically emerged at a time when the politics and logic of disposability, terror and expulsion has been normalized in US society and violence has become the default position for solving all social problems, especially as they pertain to poor minorities of class and color.
David A. Love at
The Grio writes
Eric Garner proves body cameras won’t save black men:
But what we have learned from the killing of Eric Garner, lest we were unaware, is you can go to the video tape, but it still might not matter. A man was killed by a police chokehold, and chokeholds are illegal. And he is dead on the pavement over a 75 cent cigarette. Don’t you think that is something a judge and jury should take a look at in a courtroom setting?
In the wake of Ferguson, President Obama will provide $263 million to 50,000 police officers with body cameras. In Rialto, California, where the police department introduced body cameras, the use of force dropped 60% in the first year. Not unlike dash cams, perhaps the body cameras teach the police to self-police, so to speak. This is encouraging. On the surface, anything that allows for more transparency and accountability in law enforcement practices is a good thing. So, you might even get some justice now and then — or not.
However, when the video of an alleged crime committed by a cop exists, but we are told that we didn’t really see what we know we just witnessed, there are some fundamentals that we’re missing here.
Michael Clarke at
The Guardian writes
Only a cyber ‘arms control’ treaty can keep online criminals and terrorists at bay:
Of course, states have always engaged in espionage, subversion and sabotage against each other – from steaming open official letters to blowing up telegraph poles. What is new is the extent to which this can be done from thousands of miles away with a series of clicks, by people who don’t have to take any risks. It is comparatively cheap – by military comparisons almost costless – to attempt disruptive attacks, industrial espionage and constant spying on adversaries or friends. Almost all societies are vulnerable to the complex international circuitry that underpins mobile phone, transport and banking systems.
But two elements suggest a step change is now occurring. One is that private groups and individuals can do cyber battle with big states on almost equal terms. Indeed, only the half-dozen major cyber players in the world – of which Britain is one – are really ahead of the criminals, terrorists and gentlemen amateurs these days, and their technological lead is dwindling as the costs of computing fall. Most states can be, and frequently are, taken to the cleaners by the privateers, as are some of the world’s biggest commercial companies.
The second game-changer is that the assumption of a digital world dominated by North America and its internet companies is unlikely to hold for much longer. The growing Asian economies, not to mention China, were never going to leave the cyber domain to the US. The Snowden revelations of last year have speeded up the inevitable dispersion of cyber power but added a powerful commercial dimension.