Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—Crime, Bias and Statistics:
The troubling association — in fact, overassociation — of blacks with criminality directly affects the way we think about both crime and blacks as a whole.
A damning report released by the Sentencing Project last week lays bare the bias and the interconnecting systemic structures that reinforce it and disproportionately affect African-Americans. [...]
• “Whites are more punitive than blacks and Hispanics even though they experience less crime.”
• “White Americans overestimate the proportion of crime committed by people of color and associate people of color with criminality. For example, white respondents in a 2010 survey overestimated the actual share of burglaries, illegal drug sales and juvenile crime committed by African-Americans by 20 percent to 30 percent.”
• “White Americans who associate crime with blacks and Latinos are more likely to support punitive policies — including capital punishment and mandatory minimum sentencing — than whites with weaker racial associations of crime.”
Dana Milbank at
The Washington Post writes—
Raising the minimum wage without raising havoc:
As fast-food workers demonstrate nationwide for a $15 hourly wage, and congressional Republicans fight off a $10 federal minimum, little SeaTac has something to offer the debate. Its neighbor, Seattle, was the first big city to approve a $15 wage, this spring, but that doesn’t start phasing in until next year. SeaTac did it all at once. And, though there’s nothing definitive, this much is clear: The sky did not fall.
“SeaTac is proving trickle-down economics wrong,” says David Rolf, the Service Employees International Union official who helped lead the $15 effort in SeaTac and Seattle, “because when workers prosper, so do communities and businesses.”
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy at
The Progressive writes—
Erasing History One Forgotten Political Expenditure at a Time:
Increasingly, the names of the people who are funding our privately financed elections are being erased from memory, or simply never recorded at all. Here the role of the state is mostly neglectful, not intentional as it is in China. But the effect is similar: people are naively uninformed about the powers that shape their government and their lives.
Two years later we still don't know the source of $315 million in political spending in the federal elections of 2012. Four years after the elections of 2010, $127 million in spending is still unaccounted for. In this year's elections the total is already over $50 million in dark money and election day is still two months away.
We should not let these huge sums remain hidden. And we don’t need Congress. Federal law surrounding disclosure is generally good (though there is always room for improvement like those fixes contained in the DISCLOSE Act), but transparency truly falls apart with weak implementation by federal agencies like the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Federal Elections Commission (FEC) and SEC who are responsible for crafting rules and conducting enforcement.
The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board takes issue with President Obama in
Immigration reform calls for leadership, not political calculation, without delay:
e most troubling aspect of President Obama's decision to delay using executive action to change the nation's immigration system is that it seems rooted in crass political calculation. In that, he has now joined House Republicans in putting politics ahead of the needs of the nation, which is not a particularly good move for a president trying to cement his legacy.
Immigration reform is a thorny issue, and we won't rehash its nuances here. But nearly all the players recognize that fundamental change is needed. So why is it that there never seems to be a right time to get it done? Why, when push comes to shove, is it always immigration reform that gets elbowed aside? Sure, there are difficult politics involved, but for more than a decade now, those politics have stood in the way of badly needed action. [...]
Simon Cottee at the
Los Angeles Times writes—
Islamic State's badass path to paradise:
Last year Vice magazine published an article on the use of social media among British jihadis in Syria. In countless “selfies” you can see these young men proudly posing in military apparel with guns at the ready. There are loving, close-up shots of personal hardware, including a chrome AK-47 with the caption “Rolling wit d chromey homey.” These jihadis seem more like frustrated high school actors, desperate for attention, than bona fide badasses.
Who, really, are these young men? We still know dismayingly little about them. But we do know something about the jihadi groups they are joining. Despite the divisions and fractures within their ranks, their goal is to seize political power. They want to establish an Islamic state or, more ambitiously, a caliphate incorporating many Muslim-majority states.
And for all their ideological differences, these groups are united in what they're against: America, Jews, apostates, gays, women's rights, religious freedom, materialism, free speech, secular democracy, alcohol, pork and on and on. We also know something about what these groups demand of their members: discipline, physical courage, piety, murderous violence and self-immolation.
The New York Times Editorial Board blasts Lone Star State officials in —
Voter ID on Trial in Texas:
In the Texas suit, testimony has shown that about 1.2 million eligible voters—including disproportionate numbers of lower-income, black and Latino voters, who tend to vote Democratic—lack a photo ID that would allow them to cast a ballot. Some never had the necessary underlying documents, such as a birth certificate; others cannot afford the time or money it takes to track them down.
The lawmakers who insist that this law is needed never bothered to come up with evidence of any voter fraud. One former election official testified that in-person fraud is “almost impossible to do.”
Texas says it has made it easier to get a photo ID by providing for a free “Election Identification Certificate.” Apparently, Texans haven’t gotten the memo: as of Friday, fewer than 300 people statewide had managed to obtain a certificate.
David Remnick at
The New Yorker writes—
World Weary:
After six years in office, Obama broadcasts his world-weariness with wan gestures and pauses, with loose moments in the White House press room. The world has stubbornly denied him his ambition to transcend its cruelties, pivot smartly to the East, and “do some nation-building here at home.” Obama’s halting cool at the lectern now reads too often as weakness, and when he protests against the charges of weakness he can seem just tired. As the Middle East disintegrates and a vengeful cynic in the Kremlin invades his neighbor, Obama has offered no full and clarifying foreign-policy vision.
His opponents and would-be successors at home have seized the chance to peashoot from the sidelines. What do they offer? Unchastened by their many past misjudgments, John McCain and Lindsey Graham go on proposing escalations, aggressions, and regime changes. Rand Paul, who will likely run for President as a stay-at-home Republican, went to Guatemala recently and performed eye surgeries as a means of displaying his foreign-policy bona fides. Was Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s ophthalmologist-in-chief, impressed?
Chris Christie insists on the efficacy of big men and tough talk—the Great Jersey Guy theory of history. Recently, he suggested that Vladimir Putin would not dare sponsor the bloody destabilization of Ukraine were Christie in charge. “I don’t believe, given who I am, that he would make the same judgment,” Christie said at a meeting of Republican activists. “Let’s leave it at that.” Christie is trying to bone up on world affairs by reading Kenneth Adelman’s book on Ronald Reagan. Adelman was the cheerful adviser to Donald Rumsfeld who insisted that the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in 2003, would be a “cakewalk.”
Alice Lee at
The New Republic writes—
Gender Quotas Worked in Norway. Why Not Here?:
ender equity in the corporate world has long been a goal that’s paid much lip service, but has nothing to enforce it but good intentions. Unsatisfied with the slow progress, a handful of countries have, over the last ten years, embraced the idea of gender quotas to govern corporate boards (a potential solution to inequality Bryce Covert suggested in a piece for The New Republic this summer). According to the 2014 International Business Report, the percentage of world business leaders in favor of gender quotas has increased from 37 percent in 2013 to 45 percent in 2014. And it isn’t just in Europe, where the quota trend began. 68 percent of leaders surveyed in Latin American and 71 percent of those in Asia Pacific (not including Japan) supported gender quotas.[...]
Corporate board gender quotas were first introduced in Norway in 2003. Before their implementation, the country had a long history of using quota policies to help increase female representation in public office. The Gender Equality Act in 1981 required 40 percent female representation in public appointed offices and councils, and the Municipal Act in 1993 required 40 percent female representation in for all appointed bodies in the Municipal Council. However, when quotas came into the economic sphere, there was a prolonged back-and-forth, as a wide swath of employers tried to halt the legislation. But after three years of debate, corporate board gender quotas passed the Norwegian Parliament.
The government ordered companies to have a 40 percent female board or be shut down.
Robert Reich at
Truthdig writes—
The Bankruptcy of Detroit and the Division of America:
Buried within the bankruptcy of Detroit is a fundamental political and moral question: Who are “we,” and what are our obligations to one another?
Are Detroit, its public employees, poor residents, and bondholders the only ones who should sacrifice when “Detroit” can’t pay its bills? Or does the relevant sphere of responsibility include Detroit’s affluent suburbs—to which many of the city’s wealthier resident fled as the city declined, along with the banks that serve them?
Judge Rhodes won’t address these questions. But as Americans continue to segregate by income into places becoming either wealthier or poorer, the rest of us will have to answer questions like these, eventually.
Edward E Baptist at
The Guardian writes—
The Economist's review of my book reveals how white people still refuse to believe black people about being black:
In 1845, Frederick Douglass, a fugitive from slavery, joined dozens of white passengers on the British ship Cambria in New York harbor. Somewhere out on the Atlantic, the other passengers discovered that the African American activist in their midst had just published a sensational autobiography. They convinced the captain to host a sort of salon, wherein Douglass would tell them his life story. But when the young black man stood up to talk, a group of Southern slaveholders, on their way to Britain for vacation or business or both, confronted him. Every time Douglass said something about what it was like to be enslaved, they shouted him down: Lies! Lies! Slaves were treated well, insisted the slaveholders; after all, they said, the masters remained financially interested in the health of their human “property”.
In a review of my book about slavery and capitalism published the other day, the Economist treated it the same way that the tourist enslavers treated the testimony of Frederick Douglass on that slave-era ship long ago. In doing so, the Economist revealed just how many white people remain reluctant to believe black people about the experience of being black.
Apparently, I shouldn’t have focused my historical research on how some people lived off the uncompensated sweat of their “valuable property”, the magazine’s anonymous reviewer wrote: “Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.” Worst of all, this book reviewer went on, I had, by putting the testimony of “a few slaves” at the heart of book about slavery, somehow abandoned “objectivity”’ for “advocacy”. [...]
Within a few hours, Twitterstorians scorched the earth of the magazine’s comments page with radioactive reviews of the review. The parodies and viral disdain forced the Economist to retract the review and issue a partial apology.
But the Economist didn’t apologize for dismissing what slaves said about slavery. That kind of arrogance remains part of a wider, more subtle pattern in how black testimony often gets treated – sometimes unknowingly – as less reliable than white. The Economist reviewer was saying that the key sources of my book, African Americans—black people—cannot be believed.
