The coal industry has a new propaganada ad campaign featuring this image:
The Reality Campaign notes the image is “remarkably familiar” to one made famous by the merchants of death:
And perhaps that similarity stems from other similarities between coal and cigarettes, as the Reality folks note:
In his farewell address last night, President Bush boasted that he has promoted “human rights and human dignity” around the world. Also yesterday, Israel shelled a U.N. compound in Gaza, alleging that the compound was sheltering Hamas militants. The attacks set fire to “badly-needed aid” for local residents.
In today’s White House press briefing — the last of Bush’s tenure in office — Press Secretary Dana Perino indicated that Bush would not be condemning the attacks and claimed that Bush had shown “unending support for the Palestinians.” Perino said that she would “let the Israeli’s speak to it”:
Q Yes, I do. I wanted to know, considering the President’s undiluted support of Israel, what does he think of Israel bombing the U.N. buildings that became sanctuaries for Palestinians?
PERINO: Well, obviously — while the President has had support of Israel, he has also shown unending support for Palestinians, and especially because he is the first President ever to promote a two-state solution. … Now, on that particular incident, I’ll let the Israelis speak to it, but obviously they had to take great care to make sure that civilians are protected.
Q How can these bombs discriminate between people in such a highly –
PERINO: One of the problems is that Hamas, which is a terrorist organization, hides amongst innocent people and uses them as human shields.
Watch it:
The U.S. is looking increasingly isolated by shying away from condemning the strikes, defying what seems to be a growing international coalition. One of Bush’s strongest allies, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, said that “no one could defend” the attack which, he said, showed that a ceasefire was “absolutely essential.’
The EU’s aid chief remarked, “I have made it very clear that all sides must respect international humanitarian law. It is unacceptable that the U.N. headquarters in Gaza has been struck by Israeli artillery fire.” Japan, Norway, Switzerland, and France have also condemned the attacks.
Also, Perino incorrectly claimed that Bush “is the first President ever to promote a two-state solution.” In 2000, President Clinton outlined parameters for for — and aggressively sought — a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Israel’s President, Shimon Peres, says:
Israel’s aim, he said, was to provide a strong blow to the people of Gaza so that they would lose their appetite for shooting at Israel.
The other aim was to prevent an Iranian takeover of Gaza and Iranian weapons from entering Gaza. He supported the idea of food being sent from Iran to Gaza, but not rockets or explosives.
“We have to stop the smuggling of arms, but someone else has to stop the provision of arms,” he said.
Most Arab states are even more worried than Israel about Iran, Peres asserted, because they don’t want to be governed by Iran.
Getting back to civilian suffering in Gaza, Peres said, “it gives us no pleasure to see people suffering.”
He says it gives him “no pleasure” to see people suffering, but he also says that the main point of the operation is to provide a strong blow to Gaza’s population to teach them a lesson. So that’s kind of a disingenuous protestation of displeasure. And of course in his remarks, Peres is echoing New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s explanation of Israeli strategy which, in turn, echoed Friedman’s own rationale for invading Iraq—that we needed to send a “suck on this” message to the Arab world. It also seems related to what Jonah Goldberg has termed the “Ledeen Doctrine”, the view that “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Israel being much smaller than the United States, it presumably needs to pick up a smaller and crappier place like the Gaza Strip.
Israeli officials are hardly alone in embracing this sort of morally hideous behavior. Indeed as noted there’s reason to believe they’ve imported these ideas from the hawkish camp in the United States. And of course policies oriented around collective punishment and reprisal targeting of civilian populations are hardly unheard of in human history. But they’re wrong and a substantial body of international humanitarian law is dedicated to making them illegal.
In a New York Times op-ed yesterday, Nicholas Kristof condoned labor exploitation in the form of sweatshops as a route out of poverty:
Mr. Obama and the Democrats who favor labor standards in trade agreements mean well, for they intend to fight back at oppressive sweatshops abroad. But while it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough.
On The Wonk Room, Sabina Dewan responds: “The notion that taking advantage of a person’s desperation for economic gain is somehow morally defensible is preposterous.”
Our guest blogger is Sabina Dewan, Associate Director for International Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
In an Op-Ed in the New York Times yesterday, Nicholas Kristof condoned labor exploitation in the form of sweatshops as a route out of poverty:
Mr. Obama and the Democrats who favor labor standards in trade agreements mean well, for they intend to fight back at oppressive sweatshops abroad. But while it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough. Talk to these families in the dump, and a job in a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty.
The notion that taking advantage of a person’s desperation for economic gain is somehow morally defensible is preposterous. There is no doubt that much remains to be done to alleviate global poverty, but in case Kristof is not aware, there are many alternative strategies that can help with this cause. The International Labor Organization’s Decent Work Agenda — which focuses on the creation of decent employment, alongside social dialogue, social protection and fundamental principles and rights at work — is but one example.
The observation that those working in factories are “better-off” as compared to those in the informal sector, undertaking menial jobs simply to survive, is well taken. But, those favoring labor standards in trade agreements reflect a much more nuanced understanding of the real problem than Kristof does.
First, they do not mistake the call for improved labor standards to be a poverty reduction strategy. Second, they understand that the higher production costs associated with better labor standards can be offset by the concomitant rises in productivity and economic performance. As the ILO noted:
Higher wage and working time standards and respect for equality can translate into better and more satisfied workers and lower turnover of staff…Safety standards can reduce costly accidents and health care fees….Freedom of association and collective bargaining can lead to better labour-management consultation and cooperation, thereby reducing the number of costly labour conflicts and enhancing social stability.
Better labor standards also help level the playing field for producers internationally, and they increase the size of potential export markets for the U.S. Finally, the inclusion of labor standards in trade agreements must be supported by additional progressive institutions such as universal education, healthcare and other social safety nets to ensure better distribution of the gains from trade.
So I would like say to 13 year old Neuo Chanthou — whose heartbreaking story Kristof used to argue his point — that rather than aspiring to work in a sweatshop, she should be in school, and when she gets home, her healthy mother and father will be able to provide for her and her disabled sister from their ‘living wage’ earned at a ‘decent job’.
Amplify Your Voice has highlighted “the latest in the long, funny and sad line of abstinence-only sex education heroes.” This new figure is Derek Dye, a “comedic juggler” who uses his skills to teach middle school children abstinence-only policies. Dye tells children lines such as, “Having sex before you are married is just like juggling machetes!” and “Sex before marriage will destroy all of your life’s dreams!” As Amplify Your Voice explains:
Thanks to George W. Bush and a complicit Congress, we currently spend $1.5 billion a year to fund abstinence-only until marriage sex education in our public schools. And yes, that money goes to people like Derek Dye, as he is employed by the Elizabeth New Life Center that received a $800,000 CBAE grant in 2007 to promote abstinence until marriage. His qualifications? A “Bachelor of Fun Arts” from Barnum Bailey Clown College, and an abstinence educator certification that can be purchased for $50.
Watch Dye’s act here:
(via TAPPED)
After something happens, it can begin to seem inevitable. The extent to which the actual has its origins deep in the past, and the present-day has been unfolding for decades, becomes clear to us all. On occasion, it’s useful to have a jarring reminder that things didn’t always seem that way. Here, for example, Joschka Fischer, a very admirable and savvy foreign policy thinker and the German Foreign Minister who tried to lead opposition to the invasion of Iraq, recalls how things seemed to him eight years ago:
We thought we were going back to the old days of Bush 41. And ironically enough Rumsfeld, but even more Cheney, together with Powell, were seen as indications that the young president, who was not used to the outside world, who didn’t travel very much, who didn’t seem to be very experienced, would be embedded into these Bush 41 guys. Their foreign-policy skills were extremely good and strongly admired. So we were not very concerned. Of course, there was this strange thing with these “neocons,” but every party has its fringes. It was not very alarming.
Needless to say: Oops.
As Andrew Sullivan notes, Steven Walt’s counterfactual about Israel-Palestine — in which he imagined if the roles of Israelis and Palestinians had been reversed — has generated a lot of much needed discussion, both about the history of the conflict and about the U.S.’s relationship to it.
Daniel Larison has a good post discussing the way that political considerations often determine the perception of terrorist groups. Larison writes:
The record seems clear: terrorist groups that are useful to us or harmful to states we officially oppose are given a pass, while those that target us or our allies are condemned in the strongest terms.
One example that supports Larison’s argument is the U.S.’s support for the Nicaraguan Contras. For more contemporary evidence, there is the U.S.’s sheltering of the Mujahedin e-Khalq, and anti-Iran guerrilla organization formerly allied with Saddam Hussein. The MEK has been under U.S. protection in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, even though it is classified as as terrorist group by the State Department. (Putting the lie to their claims of “moral clarity,” some neoconservatives have advocated supporting the formerly Saddam-allied MEK in operations against Iran, something which has certainly not gone unnoticed by the Iranian regime.)
Ross Douthat writes that he can’t imagine “Americans mustering much sympathy for a Jewish group with views, tactics and goals similar to Hamas.”
And indeed I think that American Jewish groups – the same groups that Stephen Walt holds largely responsible for America’s anti-Palestinian bias in our non-counterfactual world – would, for the most part, be at great pains to distance themselves from their theocratic, terroristic co-religionists in the Gaza Strip.
But of course we’ll never know.
Actually, we do know. American Jewish groups such as the Hebron Fund openly support and raise American funds for extremist settlers in the West Bank. These settler groups have views and goals that very much mirror those of Hamas, and they regularly carry out acts of political violence against Palestinian civilians whose land they’d like to have. Though these settler groups aren’t classified by the U.S. as terrorist groups, some have suggested that they should be — other Jewish extremist groups have been in the past — as their actions clearly meet the definition of terrorism.
It’s true that most Jewish Americans (and Israelis) condemn settler violence, just as most Irish Americans condemned IRA violence and most Palestinian Americans condemn Hamas violence, but so far this hasn’t stopped the relative few who support settler extremism from holding big money fundraisers in swanky hotels, or persuaded the U.S. government to apply the same standard to organized Israeli paramilitary violence against Palestinians that it does to Palestinian violence against Israelis.
Earlier this month, National Journal’s John Maggs sat down with anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist to discuss the future of conservatism and the economy. Asked by Maggs about the tax cut proposals in President-elect Obama’s stimulus plan, Norquist said there was only one “real tax cut” in the plan, but that there are “two other tax cuts that the Democrats could do when they get stuck.”
Norquist then suggested expensing for all businesses and cutting the corporate rate, which he said in its current form is comparable to torture:
NORQUIST: The other tax cut you could do is cutting the corporate rate. The U.S. corporate rate is 35 percent; the European rate is 25 percent. Obama is a more international guy, so we should be close to the European average. We’ll stop torturing people, we’ll stop torturing corporations, and that will make us more like Europe.
This isn’t the first time Norquist has made an outlandish and offensive comparison. In 2003, Norquist compared the estate tax to the Holocaust, saying that they share the same “morality.” But not only is Norquist’s comparison contemptible, considering the very real moral and human cost of Bush’s torture policies, his idea of a corporate tax rate cut would be ineffective stimulus.
As the Center for American Progress’ Will Straw has pointed out, permanent corporate tax cuts have a poor track record for providing stimulus:
The track record for such steps is poor in general, but they are particularly ill-suited for a recessionary period. After all, the reason that businesses and individuals are not investing at the moment has little to do with the taxes they may pay in the future and everything to do with a fear of losing money because there is no demand in the economy, asset prices are highly volatile, and credit is hard to come by.
Citizens for Tax Justice has found that “every dollar lost from cutting the corporate income tax would increase real GDP by just 30 cents,” which is a stimulative effect that would hardly justify slashing the corporate rate.
Here’s a good one. A right-wing caller to C-SPAN identifies himself as a big Fred Barnes fan and asks a question during the course of which he refers to Barack Obama as “monkey boy.” Barnes doesn’t bat an eye and just moves to answer the question:
It’s always a tight race between Barnes and Charles Krauthammer for the coveted “worst pundit in America” prize, but Barnes makes a strong case for himself here. And it’s Friday, so there’s a new CK column out in the Post I’m sure, but I think I’m afraid to read.
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