Category Archives: Commentary

All written commentary.

No joke: Arizona SB 1062 just cleared way for Uganda anti-gay law

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uganda-flagThe office of the president in Uganda has announced they will be signing their anti-homosexuality bill into law today.

The president’s spokesman cited the Arizona legislature’s decision last week to pass a bill (SB 1062) permitting private non-religious businesses to discriminate against/refuse service to gay customers, suggesting that this showed them that the U.S. wasn’t serious about lecturing Uganda — a major regional military player and U.S. ally — on anti-gay legislation.

As I write this, the following tweets were posted just in the past couple hours ago by Ofwono Opondo, the official spokesman of the president’s administration.


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South Sudan: Gathering the victims

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south-sudan-map-ciaThe fighting in South Sudan is somewhat reduced, in large part because of a massive Ugandan Army operation on behalf of the South Sudan government, but it’s still going on.

Meanwhile, human rights workers are already undertaking the awful task of trying to assemble and count the bodies from hundreds of different massacres in December. In those incidents, entire groups of civilians — ranging in size from a dozen to well over a hundred — were cut down by rampaging soldiers from the divided army after it split suddenly along ethnic lines at the end of last year. In the past 3 weeks alone, one man and a few helpers have recovered 2,000 bodies.

VW: When management is the vanguard of the proletariat

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volkswagenBeen a busy month for me so I haven’t had a chance to give the story due diligence, but if you didn’t hear: the German automaker Volkswagen’s U.S. division attempted to unionize their own workers in Tennessee.

This is unusual for a number of reasons, as I’ll get to in a moment, but it’s particularly significant coming in Tennessee, a state that has become home to a lot of foreign car manufacturers’ American branches and is a so-called “Right to Work” state. “Right to Work” laws are designed discourage unionization by changing how worker votes occur and allowing management to intimidate or pressure workers into voting against forming a union, i.e. giving workers the “right” to work outside of union (because every American must have the right to be their own David against the corporate Goliath in contract negotiations… I guess?).

So anyway, if VW employees unionize, it will automatically put pressure on Tennessee’s other foreign-based carmakers to raise wages somewhat to remain competitive and retain their workers, even if they remain non-unionized (past studies have demonstrated this effect pretty clearly), and it will probably encourage unionization drives elsewhere.
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Europe and the American death penalty

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death-penaltyTypically, the only countries that try to tell the United States what to do are in the company of North Korea and Venezuela.

Europe definitely doesn’t make a habit of condemning the policies of the U.S. government and certainly not the policies of specific state governments. Part of that is that it would be unlikely to accomplish much. Part of it is a recognition that they would not like the U.S., a peer nation among developed democracies, telling them what to do at home, either.

They may disagree privately or shake their heads, but it’s rare for European leaders to say anything in an official capacity or to do anything substantive about it. This may be changing a bit in light of the NSA scandals, but there’s also actually already been one fairly quiet exception: the U.S. death penalty. They’ve been very firm on the issue and are increasingly ramping up official activism to end it.
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An end to Spanish universal jurisdiction?

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The Spanish parliament has decided to consider a bill to limit “universal jurisdiction” currently granted to Spanish courts. This means that Spanish judges would no longer be able to rule on human rights violations not directly concerning Spain, an unusual power they currently hold and have used. The move comes immediately after a decision by a Spanish judge to pursue the arrest of China’s former president Jiang Zemin, as well as other officials, over human rights violations in Tibet.
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The dirty $3.5 million at PBS

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pbs-logoAccording to a very damning report by David Sirota, WNET/PBS allegedly solicited $3.5 million from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to produce a two-year series on the need to reform and/or slash public employee pension benefits, entitled “Pension Peril.” John Arnold and his foundation have become noteworthy in recent years because of their support for those who advocate exactly that agenda.

The Foundation, in agreeing to fund the series, reserved the right to cut funding at will, at any time, guaranteeing a lack of objectivity — against PBS rules. Following the release of the report linked above, PBS returned the money.

But the series already began airing late last year, using the Foundation’s policy positions heavily. For example, it emphasized the “need” to cut pensions to balance state and local budgets, even in cases where the purportedly near-bankrupt state/local governments were actually spending far more on discretionary corporate and “economic development” subsidies than on non-discretionary pensions. The program also advocated a California ballot initiative being bankrolled by John Arnold himself. Consistently, the show is presented as part of the news division and not an opinion show.

Episodes consistently failed to disclose the Arnold Foundation funding, despite the conflict of interest, in stark contrast to the prominent disclosure of much less directly conflicted donations of David Koch to, say, NOVA.

As Sirota points out, unfortunately (and partly as a legacy of the George W. Bush Administration), this is just the tip of the iceberg on PBS corruption by conservative money.