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"
The 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
Few 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.
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