Paul Krugman at The New York Times has sharp words for those who are Killing the European Project:
Suppose you consider Tsipras an incompetent twerp. Suppose you dearly want to see Syriza out of power. Suppose, even, that you welcome the prospect of pushing those annoying Greeks out of the euro.
Even if all of that is true, this Eurogroup list of demands is madness. The trending hashtag ThisIsACoup is exactly right. This goes beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness, complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief. It is, presumably, meant to be an offer Greece can’t accept; but even so, it’s a grotesque betrayal of everything the European project was supposed to stand for.
Dr. Steven Miles, a professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, a board member of the Center for Victims of Torture, and author of Oath Betrayed: America's Torture Doctors, writes at
The Guardian—
Psychologists' collusion with US torture limited our ability to decry it anywhere:
The report documenting the role of the American Psychological Association (APA) as an embedded accomplice to torture during the War on Terror is important for its detail, but not for its novelty. The essence of this story has been known for eight years despite APA denials, euphemisms, double-talk and whitewashing; the report simply underscores the truth of what many of us have been saying all along.
The United States Department of Defense (DOD) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) worked hand-in-glove with the APA leadership to dictate and pass a policy document intended to justify and protect psychologists who designed and oversaw interrogation by torture to break prisoners down, despite laws and professional ethics designed to prevent exactly that behavior. The core of the APA position – which was appended to DOD policies – was that psychologists worked for interrogators and had no responsibility for the health of prisoners. [...]
The latest revelations from the APA report are only a partial accounting of the scope of our government’s torture program. Even the intricacies of how CIA and DOD gained control of policy making at the APA remain murky. The scale of US torture, especially at CIA black sites, for which there is still no accounting of the names and fates of prisoners, remains unknown. Only a small percentage of the Senate report on CIA torture has been released. Only a tiny number of the photographs and videotapes of torture at Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan and the archipelago of CIA black sites have been released.
But the devastating effects of US torture persist.
Additional excerpts can be found below the orange scramble.
Todd Gitlin at The New York Times writes The Bernie Sanders Moment:
It may have seemed, only a few years ago, that the ’60s radical moment was consigned to documentaries on Woodstock, pushed out of the spotlight for Occupy Wall Street and a new generation of activists to enter stage left. But here it is again. And it is perfectly timed to crusade against what Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, calls an “oligarchy.”
In Mr. Sanders’s run — and in the absence of a White House bid from Senator Elizabeth Warren — progressives have found a candidate they can support wholeheartedly. To understand the moment that the 73-year-old Mr. Sanders is enjoying, we have to see how he got here, waiting for national politics to catch up.
The road he took out of the 1960s student movement was not the most conspicuous one, but it was the widest. And Senator Sanders now represents a culmination of one of the primary currents of the left in the past half century.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at
The Washington Post writes
Hillary Clinton’s economic bet:
You can be certain that Donald Trump will not allow himself to be ignored. But the coming week could mark the beginning of a genuinely substantive debate between Republicans and Democrats over how to define the nation’s economic problems and relieve its economic anxieties.
Clinton is making a major bid on Monday to shape the conversation with an economic speech in New York that will be followed over the next two months with rollouts of specific proposals in nearly a dozen policy areas. Her campaign knows that she still has work to do on her personal image. But like her husband two decades ago, she is betting that when the majority of voters tune in to the election next year, they will be focused primarily on their household balance sheets.
Steve Winkler at
The Guardian writes
Enter Sandman: why have Democrats fallen in love with Bernie Sanders?:
Sanders has been consistent on issues that impact the everyday lives of real Americans, and his platform is ambitious. The list of Sanders-approved-before-it-was-cool policies is long: universal healthcare; the right to an education; the impact of race on access to employment and education; avoiding wars we cannot afford and taking care of those who do fight in those wars; economic stability for the middle class; and environmental protection. He was part of the 99% before it was a hashtag. He’s so authentic that he’s hip, even to the hip kids. [...]
Washington insiders want to paint Bernie as a radical like them – outside the mainstream – but what they’re seeing someone who has been ahead of the curve his entire career. Perhaps it’s not that he’s been ahead, but that he’s never changed, while his peers have veered and swayed with every new breeze from focus groups, campaign cash and media pressure.
Paul Blest at
The New Republic Bernie Sanders Is Not the Left’s Ron Paul:
And much like Bush and McCain fifteen years ago, Clinton and Sanders are closer on the issues than a lot of progressives would like to admit. Sanders is championing reforms—a legislative or constitutional fix to Citizens United, universal healthcare, increased regulation of the financial system, income inequality—that most Democrats have supported for years, including Clinton; she was the face of the universal healthcare fight during Bill Clinton’s first term and has focused on income inequality and Citizens United in her 2016 campaign. Similarly, McCain’s biggest issues in that 2000 campaign—national defense and the Middle East—would define the Bush administration and the neoconservative movement as a whole for the next decade.
On the major issues that Sanders and Clinton disagree on—the extent to which the banking system should be reformed, surveillance, and free trade—Sanders’s position is just as popular within the party as Clinton’s, if not more so. These are the battles for the future of the Democratic Party, and where both Sanders and Clinton will seek to stake out a position independent of the other.
Susan J. Douglas at
In These Times writes
The NRA’s Bully Pulpit—America’s most dangerous nonprofit has a stranglehold on public policy:
The bully says if more people had guns, especially to defend themselves, gun violence would decline. Studies have widely discredited the bully’s claim: Guns in the home make one much more vulnerable to homicide, and carrying a firearm makes one more, not less, vulnerable to being shot in an assault. The bully also charges that reformers want to take away their guns, when we simply want better protections.
The bully also has money. Since 1990, the NRA has donated $21 million to politicians, 83 percent of it to Republicans. The gun control lobby doesn’t come close: $1.9 million to politicians, 94 percentto Democrats. Such largesse seems to blind our anti-tax conservatives to the cost of gun violence to our economy: at least $229 billion a year, according to an analysis by Mother Jones, when you add up emergency and medical care, prison and criminal justice costs, lost wages, insurance, legal fees, police investigations and the like. That’s about $700 per American per year; in a state like Wyoming with a high rate of gun violence, it’s twice that.
The bully wants us to accept this as the new normal: that we adopt an armed, militarized lifestyle. It will repeatedly threaten and intimidate our government and us to advance this lethal political agenda. It’s time to name the NRA as a bully, treat it as a bully and stand up to it as a bully, to get beyond its deadly blockage of desperately needed gun safety laws in our country.
Cody Fenwick at
Care2 writes
Will Obama Undo the Harms of the War on Drugs?:
Reports are circulating that President Obama is preparing to commute the sentences of dozens of individuals currently imprisoned for nonviolent drug-related crimes. So far in his presidency, he has only commuted the sentences of 43 individuals; that number is expected to approximately double with his imminent plans.
But 80 or 100 total commutations would fall far short of the 30,000 requests from federal inmates to be considered for clemency. [...]
Of the 1.5 million arrests for nonviolent drug violations in 2013, nearly 700,000 of those were for marijuana. Eighty-eight percent of marijuana arrests are for mere possession. All this despite the fact that states around the country have been liberalizing marijuana policy and have found few downsides, even where it’s been legalized for recreational use.
I could go on.
Joelle Gamble at
TruthOut writes
Bottom-Up Politics: Bernie Sanders and the Dream of Participatory Democracy:
In early states, like New Hampshire and Iowa, polling hints that he is gaining ground on Clinton. Polling by Democracy Corps shows that the new majority of Americans also leans progressive. But being populist or progressive on the issues isn't enough. The political infrastructure that supports the new majority and its populist ideas must also exist: a new kind of political power.
This "new power" politics is a rejection of the top-down, king-making mentality that has become symbolic of current American politics. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Jeremy Hiemans and Henry Timms define "old power" as "a currency possessed by the few." However, they argue that new power, a force on the rise, is open and participatory. It is represented by institutions that crowdsource wisdom, allow for wide participation and sharing, and capitalize on the agency of a population. It's the kind of political power driven by grassroots energy and bottom-up fundraising. It's what many may say Barack Obama achieved in 2008. But it's not the dominant force in today's political system.
Sanders needs a surge of new political infrastructure, which can only be achieved by investing in it. We should invest in technology that not only polls and analyzes voters but also engages citizens in the long-term political and policy process.
George Skelton at the
Los Angeles Times writes that
Confederate names have no place on California schools:
Most everyone by now agrees the Confederate flag should not be flown on public grounds. Why then is it OK to name a public school after the turncoat general whose army carried that flag in battle? [...]
Answer: It's not.
[...]
Neither the flag nor the famous commander should be honored on public property, especially in California, which sided with the Union in the Civil War.