Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—‘Black Lives Matter’ and the G.O.P.:
In another moment during the debate, Kelly asked Ben Carson about race relations in America and “how divided we seem right now.” She continued: “And what, if anything, you can do — you would do as the next president to help heal that divide.”
First, before the answer, I have a nit to pick with the question. The framing of the state of race relations as a “divide,” to my mind, creates a false impression, an equivalency. It suggests a lateral-ness. But this discussion is about vertical-ness, about hierarchy. It is about whether state power is being used disproportionately as an oppressive and deadly force against minorities — particularly black people — in this country.
Carson responded with a prelude that seemed to label those demanding justice and equality “purveyors of hatred” seeking a “race war,” an outrageously exaggerated use of incendiary rhetoric.
Michelle Chen at
The Nation writes—
Could Obama’s Clean Energy Plan Be Good For Coal Country? Coalitions between labor and environmentalists are pointing the way to a future beyond coal for Appalachia:
Obama’s new climate change plan has jangled nerves in the fossil fuels industry and kindled hope in the environmental community, but it might light an even greater spark in the heart of Coal Country.
While the White House’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) is weak in global terms (the projected 32 percent reduction in emissions from 2005 levels covers just a fraction of the UN’s recommended goal, lagging parallel carbon-cutting efforts by European governments), it is fueling excitement in the depressed towns that stand to gain or lose the most from the energy transformation. Whether old mining communities latch onto Obama’s program, however, hinges on finding new investment to reverse the doomed course that’s held their economy back for generations.
These communities have long seen King Coal as a source of good union jobs, yet the industry has also killed and sickened countless mine workers through disease, injury and poverty. Some community groups seek to revitalize the grid not by clinging to fossil fuels but rather, embracing energy transition, on their own terms.
More pundits below the orange divider.
Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program and publishes ArmsControlWonk.com, the leading blog on disarmament, arms control and nonproliferation, writes at Foreign Policy—Chuck Schumer’s Disingenuous Iran Deal Argument—The good senator from New York may be voting his conscience, but he’s got the facts all wrong:
Schumer is one of the most powerful members of the U.S. Senate, which is not quite the same thing as saying he’s dignified. Back in the 1990s, when he was a congressman, his House colleagues had a phrase for waking up to find he’d upstaged them in the media: to be “Schumed.” Washingtonians have long joked that the most dangerous place in town is between New York’s senior senator and a microphone. [...]
On Thursday evening, right in the middle of the first GOP debate, Schumer reached back, took aim, and heaved a large one. He penned a long piece for Medium that some anonymous hack described as “thoughtful and deliberate.” Uh, ok. Maybe compared to Mike Huckabee’s outrage about “oven doors,” but good grief our standards for political discourse have fallen. Schumer’s missive came across a bit like your crazy uncle who gets his opinions from talk radio and wants to set you straight at Thanksgiving.Schumer’s missive came across a bit like your crazy uncle who gets his opinions from talk radio and wants to set you straight at Thanksgiving.
Katie Herzog at
Grist writes—
Climate and energy feature heavily in national debate — in Canada:
There was a reasoned, undramatic, policy-heavy debate in the race to elect one of the world’s next leaders Thursday night.
In Canada. [...]
Anyway. While both our first- and second-string GOP candidates were beating drums and thumping their chests on Thursday, representatives from Canada’s Conservative Party, Liberal Party, New Democratic Party, and Green Party were debating actual policy, including what to do about climate change, which, strangely, didn’t come up down here. And they all fit on one stage!
Rachelle Hampton at
In These Times writes
A Year Post-Ferguson, the Nation’s Youngest and Boldest Movement Debates Reform vs. Revolution:
In the first conference of its kind—and the first conference of any kind for me, a 19-year-old journalism student—hundreds of activists converged at Cleveland State University from July 24 to 26 for the inaugural Movement for Black Lives Convening (M4BL). The gathering of “freedom fighters” aimed to continue the conversation about police brutality and other issues facing the black community in America.
On the last day, attendees witnessed a 14-year-old black boy being arrested for intoxication. What happened next is disputed, as most altercations between black people and the police are. I was not on the scene, but I believe the activists’ account: Unarmed activists were pepper-sprayed, including a 12-year-old girl.
The clash itself, between nearly 2,000 black activists and one of the most unjustifiably violent police forces in the country, was almost inevitable. What was extraordinary was that the protesters persevered through the pepper-spray—in a city in which Tamir Rice was killed to prevent a teenager from entering a police station—and the teenager was released into the custody of his mother instead of taken to jail, in what activist Cherrell Brown called a “community de-arrest.” [...]
When I saw the age makeup of the conference I expected there to be tension, eye-rolling on the part of younger activists and contempt from the older generation. It was nowhere to be found. Lamont Lilly of Worker’s World described the intergenerational moment as “humbling.” He says, “Here I was …sitting at the feet of giants, a new generation taking notes from the old field generals.” There seemed to be an understanding that a new movement could not operate in a vacuum, without the support and knowledge of a generation that’s already been tested.
Joe Conason at
TruthDig writes
Why Israel’s Security Experts Support the Iran Deal—and Iran’s Hard-Liners Don’t:
As Congressional Republicans seek to undermine the nuclear agreement between Iran and the international powers, they assert that hardline Islamists in the Islamic Republic are delighted with the deal while Israelis concerned over their country’s security are appalled. The same theme is now repeated constantly on Fox News Channel and throughout right-wing media.
But that message is largely false—and in very important respects, the opposite is true.
In arguing for the agreement at American University last Wednesday, President Obama noted that the most hostile factions in the Tehran regime aren’t celebrating this agreement—as the cover of The New York Post suggested. “In fact, it’s those hardliners who are most comfortable with the status quo,” he said. “It’s those hardliners chanting ‘Death to America’ who have been most opposed to the deal. They’re making common cause with the Republican caucus.” [...]
In Israel, meanwhile, the alarmist criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a sage whose confident predictions about Iran, Iraq, and almost everything else are reliably, totally wrong—has obscured support from actual military and intelligence leaders. Like experts in this country and around the world, the best-informed Israelis understand the deal’s imperfections very well—and support it nevertheless.
“There are no ideal agreements,” declared Ami Ayalon, a military veteran who headed the Israeli Navy and later oversaw the Jewish state’s security service, the Shin Bet. But as Ayalon explained to J.J. Goldberg of the Forward, this agreement is “the best possible alternative from Israel’s point of view, given the other available alternatives”—including the most likely alternative which is, as Obama explained, another extremely dangerous Mideast war.
David Cay Johnston at
TruthOut writes
Why the United States' Inequality Problem Is About a Lot More Than Money:
Inequality is about much more than the growing chasm of income and wealth between those at the very top and everyone else in America. It's also about education, environmental hazards, health and health care, incarceration, law enforcement, wage theft and policies that interfere with family life over multiple generations.
In its full dimensions, inequality shapes, distorts and destroys lives in ways that get little attention from politicians and major news organizations. How many of us know that every day 47 American babies die, who would live if only our nation had the much better infant mortality rates of Sweden?
"Poverty is not natural," Nelson Mandela once said. "It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings."
The man-made disparities between the rich and the poor are a threat to the liberties of the people. Plutarch, the Greco-Roman historian, observed more than 2000 years ago that, "an imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics." [...]
The awful truth is this: Americans have chosen our extreme inequality and all of its awful consequences in the politicians we elected in the last 35 years. We can make better choices, not that it will be easy, but then nothing that really matters ever is.
DeRay McKesson at
The Guardian writes
Ferguson and beyond: how a new civil rights movement began – and won't end:
I will always remember that the call to action initiating the movement was organic – that there was no organizing committee, no charismatic leader, no church group or school club that led us to the streets. It is powerful to remember that the movement began as everyday people came out of their homes and refused to be scared into silence by the police. It is powerful, too, to remember the many people who came to stand with us in Ferguson, the many people who were radicalized in the streets of St Louis and then took that deep spirit of resistance to their own cities and towns, leading to sustained unrest across the United States.
In those early days, we were united by #Ferguson on Twitter – it was both our digital rallying cry and our communication hub. Back then, we were on the cusp of learning how to use Twitter as an organizing tool in protest. And once the protests began to spread, we became aware of something compelling and concise, something that provided common language to describe the protests: the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.
As marginalized people, we have always faced erasure: either our story is never told, or it is told by everyone but us.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at
The Washington Post writes
Obama vs. the Republican Cavaliers:
Anyone who still thinks the president has any chance of turning the opposition party his way after watching the candidates (or listening to Republicans in Congress) no doubt also believes fervently in Santa Claus. In fact, the case for Santa — made so powerfully in “Miracle on 34th Street” — is more plausible.
The candidates gathered together by Fox News in Cleveland suggested that the hardest decision the next president will face is whether killing Obamacare or voiding the Iran deal ought to be the first order of business. All who spoke on foreign policy sought to paint the “Obama-Clinton” international strategy as “failed” and “dangerous.”
Obama does not need any private briefings on how Republicans are thinking. He realizes, as everyone else should, that there’s only one way to save the Iran accord. Republicans will have the votes to pass a measure disapproving it, and he needs to keep enough Democrats on his side to sustain his veto.
Amitabh Pal at
The Progressive writes
Lessons on the 70th Anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
On the seventieth anniversary of the U.S. use of the atom bomb against Japan, Gar Alperovitz believes the most important lessons have not been learned. [...]
Alperovitz is the author of “The Decision To Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth,” the definitive work questioning the bombings. He says the accepted notion that there was no alternative is wrong.
“There were two obvious alternatives, fully understood by the President and his advisers long before the bombs were used,” Alperovitz says. “The first was simply to tell the already largely defeated Japanese—who were signaling a willingness to surrender through many channels—that they would be allowed to keep their Emperor, who they believed to be a god. The second option was simply to await the expected Soviet declaration of war set for August 8.”
Given these two options, he notes, “virtually every top World War II military leader—including General, later President, Eisenhower—went public after the war denouncing the decision as totally unnecessary.”