Browsing PBH By Articles

Marriage–To Anyone–Shouldn’t Be Up To The State

Posted on February 21, 2013 in Articles

The Article: Gay or straight, marriage should be out of the hands of the state by Sam Bowman in The Guardian.

The Text: Last night’s vote to allow same-sex marriage was an unequivocally good thing. The classical liberal principle of equality before the law demands that the state treats gay couples the same way it treats straight ones. Giving gay couples the same recognition as straight couples will be good for them, their children, and society at large.

But there is a bigger question that has largely been ignored – whether the government should be involved in marriage at all. The debate over gay marriage has, fortunately, been won by the right side, but why is it any business of parliament who we may and may not marry at all?

Historically, marriage as a state-defined institution is a relatively new phenomenon. It was only in 1837 that the state began to register marriages, and less than 100 years before that that it made legislation concerning marriage at all. Before then, marriage was a contractual arrangement agreed upon by two individuals, upheld in the common law.

Our Economic Pickle

Posted on February 20, 2013 in Articles

The Article: Our Economic Pickle by Steven Greenhouse in The New York Times.

The Text: FEDERAL income tax rates will rise for the wealthiest Americans, and certain tax loopholes might get closed this year. But these developments, and whatever else happens in Washington in the coming debt-ceiling debate, are unlikely to do much to alter one major factor contributing to income inequality: stagnant wages. For millions of workers, wages have flatlined. Take Caterpillar, long a symbol of American industry: while it reported record profits last year, it insisted on a six-year wage freeze for many of its blue-collar workers.

Wages have fallen to a record low as a share of America’s gross domestic product. Until 1975, wages nearly always accounted for more than 50 percent of the nation’s G.D.P., but last year wages fell to a record low of 43.5 percent. Since 2001, when the wage share was 49 percent, there has been a steep slide.

“We went almost a century where the labor share was pretty stable and we shared prosperity,” says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. “What we’re seeing now is very disquieting.” For the great bulk of workers, labor’s shrinking share is even worse than the statistics show, when one considers that a sizable — and growing — chunk of overall wages goes to the top 1 percent: senior corporate executives, Wall Street professionals, Hollywood stars, pop singers and professional athletes. The share of wages going to the top 1 percent climbed to 12.9 percent in 2010, from 7.3 percent in 1979.

Congress Killed The Postal Service

Posted on February 19, 2013 in Articles

The Article: Congress—not email—destroyed the Postal Service by John Tierney in Salon.

The Text: You know that feeling of pleasure you get when you see someone stand up to a bullying, incompetent boss? It’s viscerally satisfying, isn’t it?

That’s the way I felt this morning when I heard Postmaster General Patrick Donahue announce that the U.S. Postal Service intended to move forward with a plan to stop Saturday delivery of mail, effective sometime in August. In doing so, Donahue stuck his thumb in the eye of the U.S. Congress, the mail agency’s ultimate boss. Bravo, Mr. Donahue.

You may think I have incorrectly identified the incompetent party here. After all, it’s a deeply ingrained part of Americans’ worldview that our postal service is the epitome of inefficiency and bad management, the perfect example of a bungling, poorly run government bureaucracy. That view gets reinforced from all kinds of sources – jaded journalists, editorial cartoonists given more to clichés than to cleverness, free-market economists, and others.

Obama’s War On Whistleblowers

Posted on February 18, 2013 in Articles

The Article: U.S. media complicit in Obama’s drone doctrine by Neil MacDonald in CBC News.

The Text: In 2001, when Israel started killing militant Palestinian enemies (and, often, innocent bystanders) with missiles fired from helicopters hovering so high you could barely see them, foreign reporters were urged by the Israeli government to call the practice “targeted killing.”

Most of us, including many of my American colleagues, preferred the term “extrajudicial assassination.” We felt we were in the news business, not the euphemism business.

Today, 12 years later, the Washington Post carries a front-page headline about the U.S. drone program titled, “Targeted killings face new scrutiny.”

Jane Goodall On Climate Change

Posted on February 17, 2013 in Articles

The Article: Jane Goodall on climate change: ‘We’ve just been stealing, stealing, stealing from our children, and it’s shocking’ by Agence France-Presse in The Raw Story.

The Text: Jane Goodall greets the audience by imitating a chimpanzee, then launches into an hour-long talk on her relationship with apes and how, from being a primatologist, she became an activist to protect them.

At 78, Goodall, who has 53 years of studying chimps behind her, is still criss-crossing the planet to raise the awareness of populations and their leaders on the fate of the apes and the need to protect the environment.

“I haven’t been more than two or three weeks in one place at one time,” for the past 25 years, she says.