Wednesday, June 11th, 2014
IAN MILLHISER, - Think Progress
Stephan: The social activism of the Theocratic Rightist wing of the Supreme Court is covered so poorly by the media that it is not well-understood by most Americans. But its effects are shaping our world in very uncomfortable and harmful ways -- just consider voting rights. This report describes another consequence that is even less well-known.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Bond v. United States arises out of a set of facts that seem lifted from a soap opera. Yet, if the Court’s two most conservative members had their way, it would have also cut off America’s ability to conduct international diplomacy at its knees. Justice Antonin Scalia, in an opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, would strictly limit America’s ability to comply with its own treaty obligations – calling into question whether foreign nations can trust the United States to keep the promises it makes on an international stage.
Much of the media coverage of Bond focused on its sensational facts – a microbiologist named Carol Anne Bond discovered that her best friend was pregnant with her husband’s child, so she sought revenge by stealing a toxic chemical from her employer and smearing it on her untrustworthy friend’s car, home and mailbox. Unfortunately for Ms. Bond, these actions lead to her being prosecuted under a federal law implementing the United States’ obligations under an international treaty banning chemical weapons. Fortunately for her, however, they also made her the perfect litigant in a test case attacking America’s ability to live up to these treaty obligations in the […]
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Wednesday, June 11th, 2014
LYNDSEY LAYTON, - The Washington Post
Stephan: No one is paying any attention to this, but this is a big deal. It is going to change and degrade the American university system. Tenure is important both for continuity, and to protect faculty from big money special interest pressures. You can't really understand it until you live it.
A Los Angeles judge Tuesday struck down teacher tenure and other California laws that offer job security to educators, a decision that is expected to trigger widespread challenges of teacher job protections nationwide.
Plaintiffs in the case argued that California children who are poor receive an inferior education because they are saddled with the weakest teachers, who are entrenched in their jobs and are difficult to fire. Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu sided with the plaintiffs against some of the most powerful labor unions in the country, striking down California’s teacher employment laws because he determined that they violate students’ civil rights.
A California judge ruled that the state’s teacher tenure rules violate the civil rights of students, as the worst teachers end up in the highest-poverty schools, creating unequal conditions. Read it.
Calling it a landmark decision, lawyers for the plaintiffs said that California was just the start of a planned effort to knock down tenure in a state-by-state campaign across the country. Those who have opposed tenure – from both the right and the left – have long said that the protection is an impediment to stronger U.S. education because it keeps bad teachers in the nation’s classrooms. Tuesday’s decision could […]
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Wednesday, June 11th, 2014
JANE MAYER, - The New Yorker
Stephan: The rise of the new aristocracy of the uber-rich can plainly be seen in this report. This is what we have come to because this new elite recognized that public institutions are harder to control. So they bought a government that would cut back on supporting those institutions. Here is the effect on public broadcasting by the likes of the Koch brothers.
ast fall, Alex Gibney, a documentary filmmaker who won an Academy Award in 2008 for an exposé of torture at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, completed a film called ‘Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream.” It was scheduled to air on PBS on November 12th. The movie had been produced independently, in part with support from the Gates Foundation. ‘Park Avenue” is a pointed exploration of the growing economic inequality in America and a meditation on the often self-justifying mind-set of ‘the one per cent.” As a narrative device, Gibney focusses on one of the most expensive apartment buildings in Manhattan-740 Park Avenue-portraying it as an emblem of concentrated wealth and contrasting the lives of its inhabitants with those of poor people living at the other end of Park Avenue, in the Bronx.
Among the wealthiest residents of 740 Park is David Koch, the billionaire industrialist, who, with his brother Charles, owns Koch Industries, a huge energy-and-chemical conglomerate. The Koch brothers are known for their strongly conservative politics and for their efforts to finance a network of advocacy groups whose goal is to move the country to the right. David Koch is a major philanthropist, contributing to cultural […]
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Stephan: This report makes a very important point about this worldwide trend: There is an outgoing crisis in the world ocean but it is happening almost invisibly to anyone but locals. It is another aspect of the breakdown of the world's marine ecosystems.
Click through for the links.
Millions of fish are suddenly dying all over the planet. In fact, there have been dozens of mass fish death events reported in the past month alone. So why is this happening? Why are fish dying in unprecedented numbers all over the world? When more than six tons of fish died in Marina Del Ray over the weekend, it made headlines all over the United States. But the truth is that what just happened off the southern California coast is just the tip of the iceberg.
In 2014, mass fish die-offs have pretty much become a daily event globally. Individually, each event could perhaps be dismissed as an anomaly, but as you will see below when they are all put together into one list it truly is rather stunning. So is there a reason why so many fish are dying? Is there something that connects these mass fish death events? Has something about our environment changed? The following are just a few examples of the mass fish death reports that have been coming in day after day from all over the globe…
*In April, 500,000 carp were found ‘floating belly-up […]
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DAVID FERGUSON, - The Raw Story
Stephan: You will remember the story in SR a few days ago about the murder rate in Colorado dropping since legalization. Here is the rest of the story. So where do we stand? Yes, there seem to be more traffic accidents, and yes, edibles can get you in trouble but, on balance the story of legalization is that there is no story in terms of crisis, and failure. To the contrary there have proven to a number of beneficial consequences -- such as these.
Despite dire predictions by anti-marijuana activists, overall crime rates in the city of Denver are down more than five months after legal marijuana sales began in the Rocky Mountain state. According to the Denver Department of Public Safety, rates of violent crime are down, as well as burglaries, leading to an overall decrease in crime of 10.6 percent.
The city measured the number of reported crimes from January 1st to April 30th of 2014 and compared them to the same period last year, prior to the legalization of medical and recreational marijuana use.
The number of murders, sexual assaults, violent robberies and other assaults fell by 5.6 percent. The most dramatic decrease was in the number of homicides. In 2013, from January to the end of April, the city lost 17 people to murder. In the same period in 2014, only 8 died, a drop of more than 50 percent.
Rates of arson and petty larceny each rose, but all other forms of crime were down.
The New York Times quoted legalization proponent Brian Vicente as saying, ‘Every major institution said this would be horrible and lead to violence and blood in the streets. None of that has happened. The sky did not fall.”
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