E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes Americans and the needs of strangers:
Why should the United States take in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees? Should we make policy on the basis of searing pictures? How much suffering is never photographed or televised and therefore ignored? And what is our obligation to strangers?
Humanitarians might view such questions as heartlessness. Yet those who believe that we should take in many more of those fleeing violence and death need to take them seriously.[...]
It’s easy for upper-middle-class humanitarians — yes, I guess I’m in this group — to speak from quite comfortable circumstances of their concern and horror over the suffering in the Middle East and Europe. Although taking in more refugees won’t have much impact on our unemployment rate, jobless Americans who worry about how the new arrivals might affect their ability to find work are not morally insensitive. They are reminding us of our unmet obligations at home.
Charles M. Blow at
The New York Times writes
Bernie Sanders and the Black Vote:
Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders spoke Saturday to a half-empty gymnasium at Benedict College in South Carolina. The school is historically black, but the crowd appeared to be largely white.
This underscores the severe challenge facing the Sanders campaign: African-American voters have yet to fully connect to the man and the message.
Joseph M. Schwartz, vice-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, writes at
In These Times—
Bernie Sanders Can Help Revitalize the American Labor Movement:
The Democratic primary candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) for president of the United States provides progressive labor activists with a unique opportunity to enhance the independent political capacity of a besieged labor movement. Reflecting his political roots in the American socialist movement, Sanders is the most consistently pro-labor member of the United States Congress. Just this Friday he walked the picket line in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where workers are protesting the anti-union practices of the new owners of Penford Products, a potato starch manufacture.
This past Labor Day, tens of thousands of labor activists and their allies participated in labor marches and picnics across the country in favor of Sanders’ candidacy. But except for endorsements from several progressive local trade unions, the South Carolina Central Labor Council, and the militant 200,000 member National Nurses Union, most established labor leaders have been silent about the Sanders candidacy or have endorsed his establishment opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This despite Clinton’s roots in the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party, which is financially backed by Wall Street and has long fought to diminish labor’s influence in the Democratic coalition.
More links and excerpts can be found below the fold.
Michelle Goldberg at The Nation writes Why Joe Biden Is More ‘Likable’ Than Hillary:
In a Washington Post piece titled “The Amazing Honesty of Joe Biden,” Chris Cillizza writes, “Where Clinton is struggling with the perception that she is neither honest nor trustworthy, Biden is all honesty. Where Clinton is cautious and closed off, Biden is spontaneous and an open book.” Russell Berman writes at The Atlantic, “Clinton’s poll numbers are sinking, at least in part, because she is seen, once again, as the epitome of caution and parsing. Biden may be the consummate politician, but he is seen as the opposite.”
Cillizza and Berman are right about the perceptions. It seems worth pointing out, however, that no woman has the option of this kind of candor. Try to answer this question: Is there a single woman in America about whom anyone could say, “Everybody likes her, right?” (I mean besides Beyoncé, who is worshiped for her aloof perfection.) A female candidate who was prone, as Biden is, to veering off script and saying things she should not wouldn’t seem frank and lovable. She would seem sloppy and unstable. No woman could say on national television that she might be too emotionally fragile to run for president, and still be seen as someone who could actually run for president.
David Sirota at
Creators Syndicate explores why
Prosecution of White-Collar Crime Hits 20-Year Low:
Just a few years after the financial crisis, a new report tells an important story: Federal prosecution of white-collar crime has hit a 20-year low.
The analysis by Syracuse University shows a more than 36 percent decline in such prosecutions since the middle of the Clinton administration, when the decline began. Landing amid calls from Democratic presidential candidates for more Wall Street prosecutions, the report notes that the projected number of prosecutions this year is 12 percent less than last year and 29 percent less than five years ago. [...]
For his part, [former Attorney General Eric] Holder has recently defended the administration’s record of not prosecuting any individual financial executive involved in the financial crisis. He says the fines the administration has assessed against financial institutions were effective.
“People tend to undervalue what we did with the banks,” Holder told the Financial Times. “Given the nature of the penalties that were extracted, given the interactions that we had with people at the banks, with those attorneys who represented the banks, I think the cultures have changed.”
The Editorial Board of The New York Times takes on those people who just can't keep their noses out of American bedrooms in
G.O.P. Anti-Gay Bigotry Threatens First Amendment:
In reality, the act would bar the federal government from taking “any discriminatory action” — including the denial of tax benefits, grants, contracts or licenses — against those who oppose same-sex marriage for religious or moral reasons. In other words, it would use taxpayers’ money to negate federal anti-discrimination measures protecting gays and lesbians, using the idea of religious freedom as cover.
For example, a religiously affiliated college that receives federal grants could fire a professor simply for being gay and still receive those grants. Or federal workers could refuse to process the tax returns of same-sex couples simply because of bigotry against their marriages.
It doesn’t stop there. As critics of the bill quickly pointed out, the measure’s broad language — which also protects those who believe that “sexual relations are properly reserved to” heterosexual marriages alone — would permit discrimination against anyone who has sexual relations outside such a marriage. That would appear to include women who have children outside of marriage, a class generally protected by federal law. [...]
These are radical proposals, but they are accepted without question by many in today’s Republican Party. In its current form, the bill has 148 co-sponsors in the House and 36 in the Senate — all Republicans but one, Representative Daniel Lipinski of Illinois. It has been endorsed by the Republican National Committee and at least four Republican presidential contenders. It is, in other words, a fair representation of right-wing reaction to the long overdue expansion of basic civil and constitutional rights to gays and lesbians.
Jeb Lund at
The Guardian writes—
Political outsiders aren't new. They're a campaign ploy as old as America:
If you do a search for the term “anti-politician,” you will – apart from a personal website for Pat Buchanan that probably should have a lot of white space – find article after article about Donald Trump. And Ben Carson. And sometimes Carly Fiorina. The rise of the anti-politician. The year of the anti-politician. Does anti-politician Donald Trump signal the collapse of movement conservatism?
Given the parade of think pieces, you’d think all the interest in non-political politicians must’ve started sometime in July. But as sexy as it is for the American left to think that Donald Trump represents some self-consuming metastasis of movement conservatism, his is an old story. [...]
Most presidential campaigns have almost no politicians there, at least not normal ones; if you’re lucky, you might find A Different Kind of Politician, mostly because both parties and politicians in general were polling slightly below “giving children Lunchables full of typhus”. That is why Scott Walker, a man who has run for office every cycle since the age of 22 and held elected office consistently since the age of 25, tried to claim he wasn’t a career politician. It is why Marco Rubio, a man who who spent a “career” in the private sector only slightly longer than a wealthy dowager’s accidental belch in a children’s movie and now holds federal office, keeps claiming that Washington is the problem and that politicians are out of touch.
On the face of it, anti-politician posturing by politicians borders on the frightening or the ridiculous.
Matt Gallagher at
The Guardian laments in
Soldiers are more than talking points – someone should tell Donald Trump:
No, this isn’t about Trump, though he excels at making it seem so. This is about us, Yellow Ribbon America, a land reared under the dueling narratives of World War II and Vietnam to become a country full of frothing chickenhawks so frightened of our own shadows that the consequences of things like special operations raids, drone bombings and martial occupation have been entirely outsourced to a postmodern Praetorian Guard known as the US military.
Its members are heroes, goes one script. They are mercenaries, goes another. Or monsters. Or victims. Or [insert blanket notion here.] Whatever they are, they are always someone else’s sons and daughters, which allows for those blanket notions to fester, and for the perpetuation of chickenhawk foreign policy that is bound and determined to perpetuate war somewhere, anywhere, as long as it’s far away from the homeland and can be charged to the debt machine.
Of course Trump can get away with saying absolute nonsense about the military and the nature of war. Most American citizens now don’t know any better themselves.
Matthew Pratt Guterl at
The New Republic writes
'Jack Reacher' Embodies the American View of Justice: White, Male, and Lawless:
A few years ago, teaching a class on the open road, I asked my students to read Echo Burning, the fifth of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels, published in 2001. Wandering a borderlands landscape populated by strong, dangerous, rapacious men—the sort of men one finds in the work of Cormac McCarthy or William Faulkner—Reacher is picked up while hitch-hiking by a beautiful Mexican émigré, who has been abused by her vile husband. The husband, in turn, is surrounded by a gang of criminals, each of them deserving extra-legal punishment. Reacher, after hearing the woman’s story, goes undercover as a day laborer and ranch hand, and, as the saying goes, hijinks ensue. By the end of the novel, the Texas countryside is painted red with blood, the entire legal establishment has been revealed as ineffective, and Reacher has administered his punishment. Then, as always, he moves on.
I’d asked my students what they thought of Reacher, and they suggested that he should stand trial for murder. Then, reading carefully through his interior monologues, they decided that he was insane and had him remitted to a high-security mental health facility. In our summary discussion, we talked a lot about Reacher as post-Cold War John Rambo, the Vietnam veteran suffering from PTSD who wanders into a small town in the Pacific Northwest and runs afoul of the local police. The point, for my students, was that Reacher should never have been set loose on the American countryside. Jack Reacher troubles me, too.
Jamelle Bouie at
Slate writes
The GOP helped convince Democrats to support the president’s Iran deal.:
When the administration announced the deal in mid-July, it was an open question whether Democrats would sign on. First, there was public opinion. No, Americans might not want another war, but that’s not the same as supporting an agreement with Iran, especially one that lifts sanctions. What’s more, Americans had concerns about Israel—would this open an important ally to danger from an economically emboldened Iran? Sensitive to both concerns, many elected Democrats were wary of the deal, and some—like New York Sen. Chuck Schumer—eventually came out against it.
Republicans could have capitalized on the division, running against the deal while offering an alternative and showing—in word and deed—that this was about the policy, not the president. Schumer is a Democrat, but his final statement on the deal is instructive as a model for how to thread this needle. “Advocates on both sides have strong cases for their point of view that cannot simply be dismissed. … I have decided I must oppose the agreement and will vote yes on a motion of disapproval,” he said. “While we have come to different conclusions, I give tremendous credit to President Obama for his work on this issue.”
No, it’s not red meat. But this kind of considered opposition could have peeled away enough Democrats from the administration to win the legislative battle and jeopardize the deal. Instead, Republicans jumped to hyperbole.