Wednesday, February 03, 2016

A View From The Left -WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

 

ANDREW BACEVICH, How to Avoid Real Discussions of National Security in Election 2016

To judge by the early returns, the presidential race of 2016 is shaping up as the most disheartening in recent memory. Other than as a form of low entertainment, the speeches, debates, campaign events, and slick TV ads already inundating the public sphere offer little of value. Rather than exhibiting the vitality of American democracy, they testify to its hollowness… Above all in the realm of national security, election 2016 promises to be not just a missed opportunity but a complete bust.  Recent efforts to exercise what people in Washington like to call "global leadership” have met with many more failures and disappointments than clearcut successes.  So you might imagine that reviewing the scorecard would give the current raft of candidates, Republican and Democratic alike, plenty to talk about.  But if you thought that, you’d be mistaken.  Instead of considered discussion of first-order security concerns, the candidates have regularly opted for bluff and bluster, their chief aim being to remove all doubts regarding their hawkish bona fides.   More

 

ELIZABETH WARREN: "Corporate criminals routinely escape  prosecution"

Image result for Corporate criminals routinely escape  prosecutionThe Obama administration has a substantial track record on agency rules and executive actions. It has used these tools to protect retirement savings, expand overtime pay, prohibit discrimination against L.G.B.T. employees who work for the government and federal contractors, and rein in carbon pollution. These accomplishments matter.  Whether the next president will build on them, or reverse them, is a central issue in the 2016 election. But the administration’s record on enforcement falls short — and federal enforcement of laws that already exist has received far too little attention on the campaign trail… In a single year, in case after case, across many sectors of the economy, federal agencies caught big companies breaking the law — defrauding taxpayers, covering up deadly safety problems, even precipitating the financial collapse in 2008 — and let them off the hook with barely a slap on the wrist. Often, companies paid meager fines, which some will try to write off as a tax deduction.   More

 

7 Toxic Assaults on Communities of Color Besides Flint: The Dirty Racial Politics of Pollution

For 30 years, Bullard, dean of the school of public affairs at Texas Southern University in Houston, has been writing books and journal articles about environmental racism, the fact that sewage treatment plants, municipal landfills and illegal dumps, garbage transfer stations, incinerators, smelters and other hazardous waste sites inevitably are sited in the backyard of the poor.  “I see what’s happening in Flint as the classic case and a poster child for environmental racism,” Bullard told me…  And it basically tells us that the state of Michigan believes that the residents of Flint don’t deserve equal protection. They don’t deserve the same rights that would be enforced if they were not largely poor and majority African American.”  “Unfortunately, Flint’s water scandal is a symptom of a much larger disease,” adds Madeline Stano, a staff attorney with the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment in Oakland, Calif. “It’s far from an isolated incident, in the history of Michigan itself and in the country writ large.”   More

 

The Contempt That Poisoned Flint’s Water

Even before the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, was found to be tainted with lead—before water from some areas tested at more than twice the level considered to be toxic waste, and public-health officials said that every last child in the city should be treated as if the child had been poisoned—the governor’s office knew that the water was discolored, tasted bad, smelled strange, and was rife with “organic matter.” They knew, as one memo sent to Governor Rick Snyder in February, 2015, noted, that “residents have attended meetings with jugs of brownish water.” Officials figured that a reason it looked that way was the presence of rust. And they thought that was just fine.   More

 

https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=http://img.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2016/01/toles01222016.jpg&w=1248Few Answers on When Flint Will Have Clean Water

More than three months after officials declared that Flint residents should not drink the lead-tainted water from their taps, people who live here are still lugging bottled water from a Walmart or firehouse back to their homes, where they use it to drink, prepare food, brush their teeth and bathe their children.  When that might change remains an open question, one that was not answered at a news conference at City Hall on Wednesday… Concerns about the water were first raised in 2014, after Flint, under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager, switched from Lake Huron water delivered by Detroit to water taken from the polluted Flint River. Lead that leached from the pipes, a result of a lack of corrosion control, has been blamed for illnesses, rashes and other ailments. The problem has persisted even as the city has switched back to getting its water from Lake Huron through Detroit.   More

 

How Flint, Ferguson and Baltimore are all connected

"On one level," says Henry Louis Taylor, "they all look and appear to be very, very different." But, argues the professor of urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo, it's about time we begin to talk about them in the same breath. "These are places that are left behind, forgotten," he says. "They're places we’ve gotten very good at shielding from view."  Together, he argues that these cities — and recent events there — point to the endurance in the United States of structural racism, of minorities disproportionately left vulnerable to the economy or the environment, of communities abandoned by taxpayer dollars, public interest and government oversight…  These kinds of places are frequently home to minorities. And they often exist, too, within larger regions that do have resources — but where the neighbors have been quite ingenious in making sure they don't have to share them.  "Across the board, when we start to probe deep into these forgotten places, we start to see a trend emerge," Taylor says. "We start to see the different ways in which racism impacts African Americans, and we also see the different ways where it impacts the places where they live."   More

 

The chilling rise of Islamophobia, even in our schools

In recent months, anti-immigrant rhetoric has spiked across the country—and in local and national politics. After the Paris attacks, more than two-dozen Republican governors said they don't want Syrian refugees in their states. And Donald Trump said that if he were president he would kick all Syrian refugees out of the country; Ted Cruz said Muslims should be sent to "majority-Muslim countries," but that Christians should be provided with a safe haven in the United States. Cruz made his comments about Christians while speaking at a middle school.  During that same month, harassment and violence against Muslims—and Sikhs who wear turbans or Indian women who wear headscarves and are mistaken for being Muslim—tripled, according to data from California State University's Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism…  What's most distressing to the council is how many anti-Muslim incidents have started with a teacher or a school administrator.   More

 

Welcome to Denmark. Now Give Us All Your Stuff.

Last September, Denmark paid Lebanese newspapers to run advertisements highlighting the country’s new restrictions on migrants and refugees, including limited social benefits, bans on entries for family members, and stringent language requirements. But in case it wasn’t already obvious just how unwelcome asylum-seekers are in Copenhagen, the Danish Parliament passed a new measure Tuesday that will require refugees to hand over their valuables once they arrive in country; the government will hold onto anything valued at more than around $1,500 that it deems “nonessential.” … Danish authorities said they needed the new law in order to balance their budget — it reportedly costs roughly $30,000 per year to house a refugee — but the move comes amid increased European skepticism toward asylum-seekers.    More

 

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