If you’d asked me a year ago, I would have assumed that right now we’d be arguing fiercely over how quickly we were moving the national minimum wage to $15. That we would be looking at just how to implement a carbon tax as part of a tough package of reforms to address climate change. That we’re be talking about serious reform of the criminal justice system that included an end to the death penalty. Expansion of both Social Security and Medicaid. Putting back the “bumpers” that Republicans stripped from the ACA to end that artificial crisis, while we phased over to a single-payer system.
It’s still a shock, and the world we’re facing instead—the world were the US is conducting a retreat from science, education, honesty, morality, and respect—is more than just disappointing. Because that other world? The happy path? It wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough to address the level of change that is on us right now, much less what’s coming soon.
What the Democratic Party’s “most progressive platform ever” failed to address last year was that the current system of corporate capitalism no longer has the ability to sustain the sort of broad middle class that we idolize as the best state of our economy. Capitalism is a wealth concentration engine. It always has been. But increasing efficiency has simply made that engine run too well, too smoothly. There is no room in the system for the millions of workers who were existed on nothing but the friction of old, labor-intensive processes. They’ve been stripped out, pared back, smoothed out of existence. No change, no regulation or lack of regulation, is going to put that sand back into the gears.
Leonard Pitts on the invisibility of most black deaths.
On this subject, I felt I had already spilled enough outrage onto enough pages to last a lifetime. I needed a break from the emotional carnage.
Then I saw the dashcam video that was released last week.
Granted, it told me nothing I didn’t already know. I knew how a black man named Philando Castile was pulled over last year in a Minneapolis suburb. I knew how he politely informed the police officer that he had a legal firearm in the car. I knew how the officer panicked and started shooting as Castile was complying with a request for his license and registration.
But as it turned out, I had the facts, but not the visceral truth. I didn’t know how shattering and sudden it all was. One moment it’s a traffic stop and then — bangbangbangbangbangbangbang! — it’s an execution.
That jurors watched that video and then nodded over it. Said “sure, that’s okay.” It seems incredible. And that’s with such compelling, overwhelming, visceral evidence.
I thought of all those people who assure me, with a smugness found only in the profoundly ignorant, that if black people would just treat police with respect and obey their commands, they wouldn’t get hurt. I would ask them to tell me which of those things Castile failed to do.
You’d think that, with demonstration after demonstration already behind us, that just how readily police are willing to shoot black men would cease to be shocking. That just how quickly jurors absolve them of responsibility would stop being disgusting. Nope.
Ibram Kendi on that shock and disgust.
Why are police officers rarely charged for taking black lives, and when they are, why do juries rarely convict? …
We may never know why justice is still segregated from black death. Prosecutors, like juries deliberate behind closed doors. But that has not stopped people trying to find answers. On one side, people say: America is racist, and jurors are like cops — they hate black people. On the other: The police account is indisputable. Black lives do not matter.
That last line “Black lives do not matter,” seems to be the inevitable conclusion of what happened in the death of Philando Castile. And so many others.
The deeper answer is that black death matters. It matters to the life of America, by which I mean the blood flow of ideas that give life to Americans’ perceptions of their nation.
In these high-profile cases, it is not just police officers who are on trial. America is on trial. Either these deaths are justified, and therefore America is just, or these deaths are unjustified, and America is unjust.
Go read the rest.
Sally Yates, yes that Sally Yates, on criminal justice reform.
All across the political spectrum, in red states and blue states, from Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and the Koch brothers to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and the American Civil Liberties Union, there is broad consensus that the “lock them all up and throw away the key” approach embodied in mandatory minimum drug sentences is counterproductive, negatively affecting our ability to assure the safety of our communities.
[Insert sound of needle being dragged from record] That opinion may extend from left to right, but it clearly doesn’t extend to Beauregard the Angry, Forgetful Elf on Trump’s shelf. Jefferson Sessions is—cheerfully—rolling back what meager progress had been made on the way to an America where enough people are locked away to make him feel “safe.” And that is many, many people.
Last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions rolled back the clock to the 1980s, reinstating the harsh, indiscriminate use of mandatory minimum drug sentences imposed at the height of the crack epidemic. Sessions attempted to justify his directive in a Post op-ed last weekend, stoking fear by claiming that as a result of then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s Smart on Crime policy, the United States is gripped by a rising epidemic of violent crime that can only be cured by putting more drug offenders in jail for more time.
That argument just isn’t supported by the facts. Not only are violent crime rates still at historic lows — nearly half of what they were when I became a federal prosecutor in 1989 — but there is also no evidence that the increase in violent crime some cities have experienced is the result of drug offenders not serving enough time in prison. In fact, a recent study by the bipartisan U.S. Sentencing Commission found that drug defendants with shorter sentences were actually slightly less likely to commit crimes when released than those sentenced under older, more severe penalties.
That last argument assumes that Sessions is concerned about recidivism or rehabilitation. Nope. His sacred honor is wounded by any suggestion that he might have told a fib. But it stands up to keeping people locked away indefinitely just fine. Which is why “honor” is the wrong word.
Christian Christensen has a name that may seem ironic for the article, but also a point.
Just as we have those in our lives who show us the right direction, we have the inverse: those who, without fail, manage to show us the wrong direction. The trick, of course, is to be able to find out who these people are, recognize their ineptitude and bigotry for what it is … and then do the opposite.
Donald Trump didn’t send out a tweet after the terrorist attack in Finsbury Park in London that killed one and injured many more. His silence after this attack was markedly different from his immediate, fevered tweeting after numerous other terrorist attacks in Europe – and that matters.
Donald Trump is silent about anything that doesn’t offend him personally. And, of course, killing Muslims doesn’t offend him at all.
Decades ago, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky coined the term “worthy and unworthy victims” to differentiate between those whose suffering benefits a particular ideological or political agenda, and those whose suffering does not.
In the case of Finsbury Park, Muslims injured by a white Christian man are not “worthy” of attention because they do not serve Trump’s larger project of the demonization of Muslims, refugees and immigrants: an indistinguishable human mass in the eyes of the US president. Nor do they serve the interests of portraying white Christian Europe (and, by association, white Christian America) as the bastion of all that is decent and good.
Both African Americans and Muslims fall automatically into the “no angels” category. White Christians of any age get instant absolution of any sin.
Carl Hiaasen brings another group for whom Trump shows no respect.
President Trump rationalized his recent mini-crackdown on Cuba as a way to pressure the Communist government to curb human-rights violations on the island.
The true level of Trump’s passion for the plight of civil dissidents — that is to say, zero — is evident from his fondness for Russia to his suck-up visit with Saudi royalty. The president has no moral qualms about dealing with oppressive, authoritarian regimes.
Wait. You’re saying that the man who delivered national policy using a bad fake accent clearly lifted from multiple viewings of Scarface doesn’t really care about the people he was supposed to be defending?
If aggressively implemented, the new policy will sharply reduce the flow of Americans visiting the country, a kick in the teeth to the struggling people of Cuba. It’s a strategy that will fail just as miserably as the 55-year-old trade embargo did to weaken the government, or bring meaningful change.
How dead does Fidel Castro have to be before we can stop fighting a war that was lost over fifty years ago? We’re not there yet.
Kathleen Parker on Trump’s unappreciated intellect.
Five months into Donald Trump’s administration, only the unwise doubt the president’s intelligence.
Just ask former FBI director James B. Comey, who, in addition to being fired by Trump, has been redefined by the president as a dishonest leaker who might have lied were it not for nonexistent tapes of their conversations.
Wait, what?
It takes a craven sort of cunning to pull that one off. One day, Comey, a man admired for his brilliance and integrity, is investigating possible collusion in the 2016 presidential race between Russia and the Trump campaign. The next, he’s watching his professional life unravel on television and reading that he’s not to be trusted.
There’s an old, old term: “a certain low cunning.” However, even this seems too much to assign to Trump. It’s more like “the audacity to attack anyone, anywhere who points up the truth.” Any perception of wisdom is in the mind of the observer.
Anne Applebaum on why we should feel relieved about having a “Mad Dog” between the world and true madness.
“It’s all under control: Mattis is in charge.” That, or words to that effect, is what U.S. national security officials have been telling European allies in recent days. Don’t worry. There won’t be any surprises. The defense secretary is making all the big decisions. …
To many, this solution is appealing. Certainly some of the Europeans who have heard this form of reassurance feel better, and probably a lot of Americans do, too. After all, the world is dangerous. A U.S. strike plane shot down a Syrian government fighter jet this week and the Syrian government has promised to retaliate. Tensions are high on the Korean Peninsula. The war in Afghanistan isn’t over.
It’s a recipe for disaster. Even if Mattis isn’t all that “mad.”
A U.S. foreign policy run by military technocrats will have the same deep flaws as the governments run by economic technocrats that are sometimes installed in countries engulfed by economic crisis. A foreign policy, like an economic policy, can succeed only if it has political backing. Difficult decisions will be accepted by the public only if they have political legitimacy. Military decisions in particular should be part of a carefully thought-out strategy, one that has been cleared by Congress, debated in public and discussed not only in the Pentagon but also in the State Department and the other institutions, staffed by experts, that we have created for this purpose.
Eugene Robinson on the dollars behind the Republican Senate’s “health care bill.”
Fundamentally, what Republicans in both chambers want to do is cut nearly $1 trillion over the next decade from the Medicaid program, which serves almost 70 million people. Medicaid provides health care not just for the indigent and disabled but also for the working poor — low-wage employees who cannot afford health insurance, even the plans offered through their jobs.
When the wealthy already have such a commanding portion of the available resources, it may seem petty to go after these crumbs. But see the top of the page. We’re in the end stages of a system that no longer generates fresh wealth. It only squeezes available resources into smaller spaces. The Republican bill just adds to the squeeze.
Additionally, about 20 percent of Medicaid spending goes to provide nursing home care, including for middle-class seniors whose savings have been exhausted — a situation almost any of us might confront. Roughly two-thirds of those in nursing homes have their care paid by Medicaid.
Why would Republicans want to slash this vital program so severely? You will hear a lot of self-righteous huffing and puffing about the need for entitlement reform, but the GOP’s intention is not to use the savings to pay down the national debt. Instead, slashing Medicaid spending creates fiscal headroom for what is euphemistically being called “tax reform” — a soon-to-come package of huge tax cuts favoring the wealthy.
Squeeze.
Rachel Cleetus on how two big issues are tightly coupled.
The nation’s infrastructure is already in a precarious state, consistently earning a near-failing grade of D-plus from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Much of it was built assuming past climate and weather patterns, with some margin of safety. But now, climate change — in the form of more frequent and severe heat waves; floods exacerbated by sea-level rise and increased heavy rainfall; droughts; wildfires; and other impacts — is adding an extra layer of risk. …
●Heat waves not only force airlines to cancel flights, as we’re seeing in Phoenix. At higher temperatures, aircraft need higher takeoff speeds and longer runways to become airborne, especially at high altitudes. Their passenger and freight capacities also decline.
●Extreme heat and drought affect the availability of hydropower and the functioning of power plants that depend on water for cooling. During recent hot summers, nuclear power plants including Vermont Yankee, Millstone in Connecticut and Browns Ferry in Alabama have been forced to reduce power production or shut down because water temperatures got too high.
That’s just the start of a longer list of ways that climbing temperatures are either damaging out infrastructure or making it obsolete.
