Jessica T. Matthews at The New York Review of Books writes—America’s Indefensible Defense Budget:
A parable, to begin: in 2016, the 136 military bands maintained by the Department of Defense, employing more than 6,500 full-time professional musicians at an annual cost of about $500 million, caught the attention of budget-cutters worried about surging federal deficits. Immediately memos flew and lobbyists descended. The Government Accountability Office, laying the groundwork for another study or three, opined, “The military services have not developed objectives and measures to assess how their bands are addressing the bands’ missions, such as inspiring patriotism.” Supporters of the 369th Infantry Regiment band noted that it had introduced jazz to Europe during World War I. How could such a history be left behind? A blues band connected effectively with Russian soldiers in Bosnia in 1996, another proponent argued, proving that bands are, “if anything, an incredibly cost-effective supplement” to the Pentagon’s then $4.5 billion public affairs budget.
When the dust cleared, funding for the bands was not cut, because the political cost entailed in reducing the number of them by, say, half would have been enormous. The resulting $250 million in annual savings, on the other hand, while a significant sum for most government agencies, would have produced the almost unnoticeable difference of three one-hundredths of one percent in the Pentagon budget.
The sheer size of the military establishment and the habit of equating spending on it with patriotism make both sound management and serious oversight of defense expenditures rare. As a democracy, we are on an unusual and risky path. For several decades, we have maintained an extraordinarily high level of defense spending with the support of both political parties and virtually all of the public. The annual debate about the next year’s military spending, underway now on Capitol Hill, no longer probes where real cuts might be made (as opposed to cuts in previously planned growth) but only asks how big the increase should be. [...]
The Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times objects because—Yet again, Trump ignores the law to impose his will on America’s neighbors:
Certainly, there’s an immigration problem that needs to be solved. The system has been overwhelmed by the uptick in migrant families arriving at the border; the backlog of cases in federal immigration courts is so severe that the average wait to have one’s status resolved is well over two years.
But for the umpteenth time in Trump’s presidency, the administration is ignoring federal law in an effort to circumvent Congress and to impose its will on America’s neighbors. The Immigration and Nationality Act unequivocally allows asylum seekers to come from anywhere and present themselves at any point along the border, not just at manned checkpoints. The main exception is for migrants coming from countries that have a “safe country” agreement with the United States, which Canada does but Mexico and other nations to the south do not.
Legal experts say that the administration will allow asylum seekers to apply for a reprieve from deportation before sending them back to their home countries, but it has set such a high bar for qualifying that few are likely to succeed. In that respect, the new rule is not only cruel, it may violate the international agreements that bar the United States from sending refugees and asylum seekers back into persecution. [...]
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—We can either choose Trump’s vision of America, or John Paul Stevens’s:
It was by chance that former Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens died on the same day that the House of Representatives voted — sadly, very nearly along party lines — to condemn President Trump for racism in a resolution laden with quotations from Ronald Reagan. This accident of timing was highly instructive.
It can make you heartsick for our country that the discussion of Trump’s genuinely vile comments about four congresswomen of color moved so quickly from outrage to detached analysis about what the divider in chief was trying to accomplish politically. Trump doesn’t even have to manipulate the public conversation anymore. He knows the GOP’s spineless congressional cheering squad will always fall into line and that dissenters will be isolated. Mainstream journalism is more willing to call him out than it used to be but eventually feels obligated to take whatever he says for granted as another exciting episode in the drama he orchestrates.
But let’s not lose track of the moment we are in. Over the course of our nation’s history, we have had moments of great progress toward racial equality and periods of betrayal and reaction. The freeing of the slaves and the empowerment of African Americans during Reconstruction after the Civil War were a triumph for justice. They were quickly followed by a loss of nerve among northern white liberals, which allowed the imposition of Jim Crow and racial subjugation in the South once federal troops were withdrawn in 1877. [...]
So Trump’s despicable use of a street bigot’s language must not be treated as just another opportunistic political ploy. His undisguised prejudice reminds us that we can choose his vision of America or the vision championed by John Paul Stevens, a very different kind of Republican. Our forebears tried to vindicate our country’s promise in the original Reconstruction, and then retreated. We dare not allow our country to retreat the second time around.
Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine writes—Trump Goads Crowd Into Urging Deportation of Congressional Democrat:
After President Trump made racist attacks on left-wing Democrats, his supporters engaged in frantic historical revisionism. Trump was not calling his non-white targets foreign or denying their Americanness, they insisted. He merely noted that they may wish to emigrate given their deep ideological disagreement with the country’s institutions and political character. “His message is simple: The U.S.A. is the greatest nation on Earth, but if people aren’t happy here they don’t have to stay,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham calmly explained.
Wednesday night, Trump dispensed with that pretense. After a long and almost entirely dishonest attack on Ilhan Omar, his crowd began echoing Trump’s infamous words, chanting, “Send her back!”
Trump pauses to let the chant build before resuming his slander.
While most the the party apparatus is committed to the pretense that Trump was merely inviting left-wing America-haters to move to a more congenial place, Trump and his crowd are perfectly aware of what he meant. “Send her back” is not describing voluntary emigration.
Amanda Marcotte at Salon writes—Republicans will never say that racism is "racism." Basically it's because they're racist:
As Heather Digby Parton pointed out in Salon, the whole purpose of Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Lindsey Graham's recent visit to a migrant detention center in McAllen, Texas, was "to reassure their voters that they were treating the scary brown people with much cruelty as they could get away with" by making sure people knew that these men were being crammed into cages, denied sleep and showers, and basically subjected to torture.
You would be hard-pressed to find a conservative who would characterize his own satisfaction at seeing this abuse as "racism." "Racism" by definition is irrational and unfair, and Trump's supporters think their stereotypes about Latino immigrants being criminals are justified.
Racism is hard to eradicate because the racist brain has a robust immune system developed to protect its bigoted beliefs. Efforts to educate about the irrationality of racist beliefs are dismissed as "political correctness." Efforts to stigmatize the expression of racist views are characterized as assaults on "free speech." Unfortunately, that also means that these kinds of public debates about race only make Trump supporters more fiercely defensive of their bigoted beliefs, which the Ipsos polll registered by showing that Republican support for Trump has intensified in the wake of his "go back" comments.
William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut writes—Trump’s Racism Is Not Blundering — It Is Tactically Deliberate:
Donald Trump is a giant flapping racist and doesn’t give a single damn if that bothers you. Given this reality, it is important to note that when Trump dispensed with all pretense and held a one-man Sunday morning Klan rally on Twitter, it was not a blunder on his part.
When he dug his heels in on Monday morning and said the women of color he insulted were the ones who owed an apology, it was not an oops.
When asked pointedly by reporters on Monday if he was bothered that white nationalists have been celebrating his outburst, Trump replied, “It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me. And all I’m saying, they want to leave, they can leave.” It was not a misstatement. [...]
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—What Trump Is Teaching Our Children:
[Donald Trump] is everything we teach our children not to be. In Trump’s world of immorality, the lessons being taught undo all the principles parents struggle to instill.
He is teaching our children that there is no absolute truth, there is “alternative fact.” It’s not what you say, but how you say it and how vociferously you can defend it.
He is teaching little boys that women’s bodies exist as playgrounds for privileged men, and that there is no price to be paid if you are popular enough or rich enough.
He is teaching little girls that if they are ever victims of sexual assault by a popular, wealthy boy and deign to reveal it, they will likely to come under withering verbal assault.
He is teaching our children that the color of one’s skin does indeed supersede the content of one’s character. He is teaching them that there is a skin-color hierarchy in which whiteness is perched on top.
He is teaching the black and brown children that their citizenship and connection to this country is tenuous and fractional, not like white children.
Matt Ford at The New Republic writes—Make the Guarantee Clause Great Again:
The Supreme Court’s 5–4 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause last month dealt a harsh blow to American democracy. For the last decade, federal courts were the strongest bulwark against partisan gerrymandering in the states, but Chief Justice John Roberts closed the door on that remedy in the future. In his opinion, though, he accidentally hinted at another way to challenge warped legislative maps on constitutional grounds.
“The District Court nevertheless asserted that partisan gerrymanders violate ‘the core principle of [our] republican government’ preserved in [Article I, Section 2], ‘namely, that the voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around,’” Roberts wrote, referring to the lower court’s finding that North Carolina’s maps were unconstitutional. “That seems like an objection more properly grounded in the Guarantee Clause of [Article IV, Section 4], which ‘guarantee[s] to every State in [the] Union a Republican Form of Government.’”
“This court,” he added, “has several times concluded, however, that the Guarantee Clause does not provide the basis for a justiciable claim.”
What if the clause did, though? While the court has long held that the clause can’t be invoked in federal courts, that interpretation of the Constitution isn’t without its critics. The resurgence of anti-republican measures in the laboratories of oligarchy, and the Roberts Court’s unwillingness to intervene, cry out for alternatives. Like Excalibur resting at the bottom of a lake, the Guarantee Clause waits to be pulled from the constitutional netherworld and wielded on behalf of the people.[...]
Audrea Lim at The Nation writes—The Street-by-Street Battle Against Climate Change:
Adan Palermo’s street, in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood, was always his playground. As a child, the tranquil stretch of row houses, between the six-lane 4th Avenue thruway and the eternal shadow of the elevated Gowanus Expressway, was a place for him and his friends to hit baseballs with plastic bats.
Since 2017, the 26-year-old has also been its “block captain,” a role that emerged after Superstorm Sandy brought New York City to a week-long standstill, and the task of identifying neighborhood point-people ahead of emergencies began to seem more urgent. “We’re already close to the water,” he said. And the climate crisis promises to bring more extreme weather disasters to his street, located half a mile from New York Bay, whose waters inundated the nearby neighborhood of Red Hook after Sandy. “Our folks are already at a disadvantage. Sunset Park is a low-income community.”
The “block captain” initiative is part of the Sunset Park Climate Justice Center, which the community organization UPROSE established by popular demand at a series of neighborhood meetings following Sandy. The neighborhood, with its mix of Puerto Rican, Dominican, Ecuadorian, Mexican, and Chinese residents, is one of New York City’s six Significant Maritime and Industrial Areas—areas where polluting industries have historically been clustered, and where the city intends to continue clustering them. All are located in storm-surge areas. Also, all are predominantly low-income communities of color.
But since 1966, UPROSE has been organizing the neighborhood “block-by-block,” as their organizers say, to win lead-paint abatement legislation, fight an expansion of the Gowanus Expressway (high rates of asthma cluster in its immediate vicinity), defeat plans for a 520 mega-watt power plant, and initiate a community-led planning effort that transformed a former illegal dumping ground into a waterfront city park. And now, the Climate Justice Center intends to build climate adaptation and resiliency through a similar grassroots strategy. [...]
Mark Trahant at Indian Country Today writes—Treaties are a contract between sovereigns; the legacy of Justice John Paul Stevens:
The 1979 Boldt decision -- or United States v. Washington -- was one of the many cases that [John Paul] Stevens helped shape. The Supreme Court did not review the Boldt case, but it denied the state of Washington’s appeal from the U.S. 9th Circuit. However Washington would not give up and refused to enforce the court's orders. That brought the matter back to the Supreme Court where it mostly affirmed Judge George Boldt’s 1974 decision. The state supreme court had ruled that the fisheries department need now comply with federal law and that “the treaties did not give the Indians a right to a share of the fish runs.”
Stevens disagreed and wrote for the majority that tribes “both sides have a right, secured by treaty, to take a fair share of the available fish.”
Stevens called treaties “essentially a contract” between two sovereigns. And, “When Indians are involved … the treaty must therefore be construed, not according to the technical meaning of its words to learned lawyers, but in the sense in which they would naturally be understood by the Indians.’”
Ellie Mae Hagan at The Guardian writes—We shouldn’t have to live in a world where women are afraid to say no:
Although Walsh’s experience is much more extreme and frightening than mine, both examples reveal the reluctance women feel to rebut a man’s unwanted advances when he holds some sort of power – be it physical or economic. In the wee small hours when alcohol is flowing, perhaps a man will just be crazy enough to physically harm you if you tell him no. If that man is your boss, maybe you’ll find your work life becoming that little bit harder after you inform him that what he regards as swashbuckling charm is actually sexual harassment.
But men don’t have to hold direct power to make rebutting their advances an unnerving experience for women. The philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky compared patriarchy to the panopticon, a type of prison that allows a single security guard to see every inmate while the inmates can never tell whether the guard is looking at them. Feeling as if they are constantly being watched, the inmates are motivated to behave themselves at all times, just in case. Similarly, argued Bartky, most women have a “male connoisseur” in their consciousness, and they are perpetually aware of themselves as existing under the judgment of a male-dominated society, even when men aren’t actually doing anything to reinforce this understanding.
In other words, men don’t need to directly threaten women for it to be scary to say no to them.
Durecka Purnell at The Guardian writes—The killer cop who took Eric Garner's life walks free. How do we secure justice?
On Tuesday, the Department of Justice announced that it declined to bring federal civil rights charges against New York Police Department Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who choked the life out of Eric Garner. Tomorrow marks the five year anniversary of the homicide. This refusal of an indictment is unfortunately unsurprising. Killer cops are rarely sent to jail.
In his study on police crimes, criminologist Philip Stinson found that despite killing about 1,100 people annually, prosecutors charge on average 7 cops a year with murder or manslaughter. About 80 officers total (out of approximately 13,000 officers who killed someone) have been charged since 2005. This figure is astounding since prosecutors secure grand jury indictments at remarkable rates, 99% for federal grand juries, and most cases end in defendant pleas (97%).
Prosecutors often don’t indict because they are also law enforcement and will pay the consequences for charging one of their own. St Louis County district attorneys, the ones who mishandled the grand jury process for Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson after killing Michael Brown, Jr, joined the local police union earlier this year. Police unions donate to prosecutor races, oust prosecutors who charge cops, and condemn district attorneys who might. [...]
In Ferguson, we often chanted, “Indict! Convict! Send that killer cop to jail! The whole damn system is guilty as hell!” Myself included. Here lies a painful truth: we can’t rely on these guilty systems for our liberation. Thus, police officers will rarely be found guilty if killing black people is part of the job, like stop and frisk, walking the beak, and jumpouts. Regular, everyday “community policing” is violent.