Abbreviated Pundit Round-up

Visual source: Newseum

It would be nice to think that people are finally tiring of draconian penalties and prisons for profit, but as Michelle Alexander details, the motivations for a change in attitude have more to do with budgets than morals.

Thirty years of civil rights litigation and advocacy have failed to slow the pace of a racially biased drug war or to prevent the emergence of a penal system of astonishing size. Yet a few short years of tight state budgets have inspired former ?get tough? true believers to suddenly denounce the costs of imprisonment. ?We?re wasting tax dollars on prisons,? they say. ?It?s time to shift course.?

...

Those who believe that righteous indignation and protest politics were appropriate in the struggle to end Jim Crow, but that something less will do as we seek to dismantle mass incarceration, fail to appreciate the magnitude of the challenge. If our nation were to return to the rates of incarceration we had in the 1970s, we would have to release 4 out of 5 people behind bars.

Unless we're reminded, there's a tendency to forget just how daunting a hole we've dug for ourselves through decades of "getting tough."

The Supreme Court has fired the starting gun for unlimited corporate cash in politics.  John Bogle wonders if shareholders can wave the red flag.

The vote was made possible because the Securities and Exchange Commission rightly decided in March to allow proxy proposals that require public companies to permit their shareholders to weigh in on their political spending.

This means that, notwithstanding the Supreme Court?s decision last year that laws limiting corporate political contributions violate constitutional free speech principles, the game is far from over. Shareholders ? not self-interested corporate managers ? should, and can, decide policies on corporate political contributions.

But with most stock in the hands of the money men behind huge funds, is anyone willing to tell the corporate management no?

Thomas Friedman cheers for the Arab spring, but worries that Arabs will remember too well the deal the west made in keeping them in winter for so long.

So outsiders face a cruel dilemma: Those who say America should have stood by Hosni Mubarak, or should not favor toppling Bashar al-Assad in Syria ? in the name of stability ? forget that their stability was built on the stagnation of millions of Arabs, while the rest of the world moved ahead. The Arab people were not offered Chinese autocratic stability: We take your freedom and give you education and a rising standard of living. Their deal was Arab autocratic stability: We take your freedom and feed you the Arab-Israeli conflict, corruption and religious obscurantism.

George Will frets that freedom will never soar unless big corporations are allowed to fly away from their promises to organized labor without consequences.

Oh, graphene, is there anything you can't do? The sheets of carefully arranged carbon atoms have be tagged as potential components for wonder batteries, super computers, and structural components many times stronger than steel, and now it seems they may reveal the shape of space-time.

Could the structure of space and time be sketched out inside a cousin of plain old pencil lead? The atomic grid of graphene may mimic a lattice underlying reality, two physicists have claimed, an idea that could explain the curious spin of the electron.

Want to get a sense of the potential for wind power? James Walker urges you to put down the weather charts and visit the Anaheim convention center.

In case you've stopped looking north, Wisconsin is still up there, and Mike McCabe of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign points out that what's happening in his state is just a symptom of an economic system on the rocks.

We have reached the point in which the richest 1% of Americans have more wealth than the bottom 95% combined, a sad truth verified in 2009 by PolitiFact.com. The 400 richest Americans have a bigger net worth than half of all Americans collectively, another harrowing statistic confirmed by PolitiFact earlier this year.

Such a grotesque redistribution of wealth from the many to a privileged few is inconsistent with any legitimate notion of economic justice, not to mention incompatible with democracy.

...

In Wisconsin, less than 1% of the population pays for all the election campaigning by state politicians. After buying the elections, that tiny fraction of our society ends up owning our government. These elites are then rewarded with what amounts to "wealthfare" payments - tax breaks, pork barrel spending, patronage jobs, no-bid contracts for state government work and other special benefits - at our expense.

It doesn't have to be this way. We are better than this.

Let's hope so.

 

Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/p0nL0sShhUQ/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Round-up

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