Excerpts from recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad:
Dec. 26
Kansas City Star on racial healing:
Long-simmering tensions over policing and race relations boiled over on Aug. 9 when a White police officer shot an unarmed Black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri.
Crowds gathered, rage erupted and the nation was drawn into an emotional examination of the way its police and criminal justice system treat people of color.
The passions stirred on many fronts remain high as the year draws to a close.
Decisions by grand juries not to indict the officer who shot Brown or a New York City police officer whose choke-hold tactic resulted in the death of another Black man, Eric Garner, gave rise to enduring protests across the nation. And the appalling murders of two New York City police officers have kindled recriminations against the protesters and politicians who have sympathized with them.
The St. Louis area remains particularly tense. Angry crowds gathered this week when a police officer in Berkeley, Missouri, fatally shot an 18-year-old Black man. Emotions abated somewhat when a surveillance camera appeared to show that the teenager had pointed a gun at the officer.
Cool heads and empathy will be needed in 2015 as communities and the nation continue to wrangle with these issues.
Contentions by Black Americans that they are subject to more aggressive policing and less protection from the criminal justice system than White Americans are valid and must lead to reforms.
But the many hardworking police officers who protect communities in a fair and courageous manner deserve respect and protection, too.
Kansas City Mayor Sly James this week appropriately touched on both sides of this divide, saying, “I support protests but I definitely support our local police, too.” Police Chief Darryl Forté, who like James is African-American, has encouraged lawful protests in the city, including positive communication with and treatment of marchers. That helps explain the lack of violence or much illegal behavior so far in Kansas City.
The events and issues that have come to be summed up as “Ferguson” will resonate particularly loudly in Missouri.
Gov. Jay Nixon has been heavily criticized by fellow Democrats, Republicans, Blacks and Whites for moving too slowly and ineffectually to quell violent outbreaks following Brown’s death, and for failing to prevent more destruction after the grand jury’s decision in the case was announced.
Nixon’s actions and sometimes-bumbling demeanor frustrated African-Americans, who are seeking a coherent voice to address their concerns about racial profiling, indiscriminate ticketing for minor offenses and failing schools. He fared no better with Missourians who viewed much of what went on in Ferguson as a breakdown of law and order. The governor has a lot of fence-mending ahead of him.
He did make some positive moves, including appointment of the “Ferguson Commission,” which must do the hard work of listening to people’s concerns and offering meaningful solutions.
Soon, the Missouri General Assembly will consider a number of bills that have been filed in the wake of Ferguson. They include proposals for clearer parameters for police use of deadly force, requiring special prosecutors for all police shootings and universal use of body cameras by police. These should be handled without emotion and with an eye toward unintended consequences.
A number of officials, including state auditor Tom Schweich and Attorney General Chris Koster, are working on the problem of police departments aggressively handing out traffic tickets to raise money for municipalities. This practice, rampant in and around Ferguson, is unfair and poisonous for relationships between police and citizens.
Nationally, President Barack Obama should use the events of 2014 to push for substantive progress in race relations in America. His actions so far have been appropriate. Obama correctly called for calm after the grand jury decisions in Brown’s and Garner’s deaths and following the murders of New York police officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has opened civil rights investigations in Ferguson and elsewhere. Those should be handled properly and lead to constructive actions.
The new focus on policing and race relations was conceived in tragedy and continues to claim lives. It is imperative in 2015 to turn the terrible losses into some lasting good.
This is the second of a five-part series on major issues that will ignore the calendar year’s end and demand attention again in 2015.
Online:
https://www.kansascity.com
____
Dec. 30
Boston Herald on colleges:
The U.S. Department of Education’s own comments on its draft of a document to establish a federal government rating system for colleges succinctly state the problems — in our view insuperable — with the whole enterprise.
“Many of the factors that contribute to a high quality postsecondary education are intangible,” not measured by numerical data, or by available data. “Among these are learning outcomes,” which “vary widely across programs and institutions and are communicated in many different ways.”
President Obama instructed the department to develop a system that would recognize colleges that excel at enrolling students from all backgrounds, focus on maintaining affordability and succeed in helping all students graduate within a reasonable amount of time. The department plans to consider two-year and four-year institutions separately, sorting each group into the high-performing, the low-performing and those in the middle.
Among the criteria on which the department seeks public comment are three on family income or socioeconomic status, two on cost of attendance, employment and earnings of graduates, graduate school attendance and loan repayment rates.
Under any system of numerical ratings institutions may try to make the numbers look favorable. Graduation rates too low? Ease up on grading standards. (There’s been enough of that already.)
Without details, the department said it was “considering accounting for differences in institutional characteristics such as degree and program mix and selectivity.”
There’s the rub. Harvard, MIT, Holy Cross, Hampshire, Salem State, Smith, the Boston Museum School, the Berklee College of Music and the Massachusetts Maritime Academy are hugely different. The handful of colleges like Harvard that can admit students without regard to need will present further important differences from those that can’t.
All things considered, the department must devote more thought to the task before it.
Online:
https://www.bostonherald.com
___
Dec. 30
Orange County Register, Santa Ana, California, on the rise of the “boardroom liberal”:
As President Obama has embraced the epithet “emperor” as an ironic “badge of honor,” Democrats are beginning to realize that an imperious mentality has been in their midst for years. In a talked-about new article at the New Republic, Noam Scheiber proclaimed a new kind of Democrat, the “boardroom liberal,” with Obama’s in-house guru, Valerie Jarrett, personifying the role.
Dutifully progressive on social matters, the boardroom liberal, nonetheless, is as much a creature of corporate culture as of the counterculture. In fact, Scheiber suggests, as the two have merged in the boardroom and the bureaucracy, a new kind of governing logic has emerged. Patronage is used by privileged operators to elicit big money and big favors, growing the influence and power of the elite while checking off politically correct policy boxes along the way.
Old-school, big-time corporate bosses were once reviled as “imperial CEOs.” But today, as Suzanne McGee argued in the Guardian, all-powerful boardroom liberals have shed the stigma by mastering the optics of proper caring. Corporate America is now dominated by the kind of perpetually teamworked and sensitivity-trained character found across our deeply liberal government bureaucracies. It’s no surprise that today’s elite put on a near-perfect performance of left-leaning cultural values. In the postmodern world they live in, the amount of money and lip service they pay to those values makes it impossible for anyone to judge whether they “truly” believe.
Furthermore, according to McGee, “the reason boardroom liberals need to exist at all is the fact that the social safety net that once existed has collapsed, and while some of that can probably be traced to waste and mismanagement, another giant chunk is simply due to lack of resources.”
As evidence, she points to the current level of tax revenue. Yet, she then points out how big business and big government both squander even the vastest of resources. In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg pledged $100 million for Newark’s public schools – “only to see most of that money vanish, as if into a sinkhole. The gift wasn’t terribly well thought-out, critics have said, and suffered most from its top-down nature and the lack of inclusion from the local community.”
These same criticisms go triple for a government-planned economy.
Online:
https://www.ocregister.com
___
Dec. 31
Khaleej Times, Dubai, on U.S. dealing with Russia:
After having offered an olive branch to Iran and Cuba, his biggest strategic challenge is how to bring back Vladimir Putin on congenial terms. That, however, is not going to happen anytime soon. The simple reason is that the Russian czar seems to be exhibiting brinkmanship, as he has pushed his country on a warpath with the West. The annexation of Crimea and a proactive role in supporting the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine have made him controversial enough to avoid rubbing shoulders with his Western counterparts. The hasty exit from Brisbane wherein he refused to face the world leaders for reasons best known to him exhibits the unease that has set in.
Now the US president, in an interview with National Public Radio, claimed that Putin’s adventurism has cost him his country’s economy. Obama said that the collapse of the rouble and the plunge that the economy has taken are evident of the fact that the Russian roulette didn’t work. Though Obama’s thrust was on making a point that he didn’t fall back in dealing with a resurgent leadership in Kremlin, that argument hasn’t helped in streamlining relations with Russia.
A plethora of sanctions that the US and the European Union have slapped are inadvertently hurting the Western economies, and the fall of oil prices and the widening of budget deficits of even prosperous countries is a case in point. Putin has already made it clear that he could somehow steer out of the rouble crisis, but it would be too hard for the West to put their houses in order if another recession sets in. This war of nerves between the West and Russia calls for a leadership dialogue, wherein the purpose shouldn’t be to castigate or belittle Russia, but to find a way out of the stalemate.
The crisis in Ukraine is one aspect of the entire discord, and at the same time there are other issues that should also come under the scanner, namely the restlessness of the states that sit on the borders with Europe and Russia, the refusal of EU membership to Turkey and last but not the least stalled progress on the missile defense shield and disarmament between Washington and Moscow. The setback that the global economy has seen in recent weeks warrants an immediate action to stop the new Cold War so that synergies are spent on development and investment rather than a new phase of militarization and warfare.
Online:
https://www.khaleejtimes.com
Dec. 26
Kansas City Star on racial healing:
Long-simmering tensions over policing and race relations boiled over on Aug. 9 when a White police officer shot an unarmed Black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri.
Crowds gathered, rage erupted and the nation was drawn into an emotional examination of the way its police and criminal justice system treat people of color.
The passions stirred on many fronts remain high as the year draws to a close.
Decisions by grand juries not to indict the officer who shot Brown or a New York City police officer whose choke-hold tactic resulted in the death of another Black man, Eric Garner, gave rise to enduring protests across the nation. And the appalling murders of two New York City police officers have kindled recriminations against the protesters and politicians who have sympathized with them.
The St. Louis area remains particularly tense. Angry crowds gathered this week when a police officer in Berkeley, Missouri, fatally shot an 18-year-old Black man. Emotions abated somewhat when a surveillance camera appeared to show that the teenager had pointed a gun at the officer.
Cool heads and empathy will be needed in 2015 as communities and the nation continue to wrangle with these issues.
Contentions by Black Americans that they are subject to more aggressive policing and less protection from the criminal justice system than White Americans are valid and must lead to reforms.
But the many hardworking police officers who protect communities in a fair and courageous manner deserve respect and protection, too.
Kansas City Mayor Sly James this week appropriately touched on both sides of this divide, saying, “I support protests but I definitely support our local police, too.” Police Chief Darryl Forté, who like James is African-American, has encouraged lawful protests in the city, including positive communication with and treatment of marchers. That helps explain the lack of violence or much illegal behavior so far in Kansas City.
The events and issues that have come to be summed up as “Ferguson” will resonate particularly loudly in Missouri.
Gov. Jay Nixon has been heavily criticized by fellow Democrats, Republicans, Blacks and Whites for moving too slowly and ineffectually to quell violent outbreaks following Brown’s death, and for failing to prevent more destruction after the grand jury’s decision in the case was announced.
Nixon’s actions and sometimes-bumbling demeanor frustrated African-Americans, who are seeking a coherent voice to address their concerns about racial profiling, indiscriminate ticketing for minor offenses and failing schools. He fared no better with Missourians who viewed much of what went on in Ferguson as a breakdown of law and order. The governor has a lot of fence-mending ahead of him.
He did make some positive moves, including appointment of the “Ferguson Commission,” which must do the hard work of listening to people’s concerns and offering meaningful solutions.
Soon, the Missouri General Assembly will consider a number of bills that have been filed in the wake of Ferguson. They include proposals for clearer parameters for police use of deadly force, requiring special prosecutors for all police shootings and universal use of body cameras by police. These should be handled without emotion and with an eye toward unintended consequences.
A number of officials, including state auditor Tom Schweich and Attorney General Chris Koster, are working on the problem of police departments aggressively handing out traffic tickets to raise money for municipalities. This practice, rampant in and around Ferguson, is unfair and poisonous for relationships between police and citizens.
Nationally, President Barack Obama should use the events of 2014 to push for substantive progress in race relations in America. His actions so far have been appropriate. Obama correctly called for calm after the grand jury decisions in Brown’s and Garner’s deaths and following the murders of New York police officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has opened civil rights investigations in Ferguson and elsewhere. Those should be handled properly and lead to constructive actions.
The new focus on policing and race relations was conceived in tragedy and continues to claim lives. It is imperative in 2015 to turn the terrible losses into some lasting good.
This is the second of a five-part series on major issues that will ignore the calendar year’s end and demand attention again in 2015.
Online:
https://www.kansascity.com
____
Dec. 30
Boston Herald on colleges:
The U.S. Department of Education’s own comments on its draft of a document to establish a federal government rating system for colleges succinctly state the problems — in our view insuperable — with the whole enterprise.
“Many of the factors that contribute to a high quality postsecondary education are intangible,” not measured by numerical data, or by available data. “Among these are learning outcomes,” which “vary widely across programs and institutions and are communicated in many different ways.”
President Obama instructed the department to develop a system that would recognize colleges that excel at enrolling students from all backgrounds, focus on maintaining affordability and succeed in helping all students graduate within a reasonable amount of time. The department plans to consider two-year and four-year institutions separately, sorting each group into the high-performing, the low-performing and those in the middle.
Among the criteria on which the department seeks public comment are three on family income or socioeconomic status, two on cost of attendance, employment and earnings of graduates, graduate school attendance and loan repayment rates.
Under any system of numerical ratings institutions may try to make the numbers look favorable. Graduation rates too low? Ease up on grading standards. (There’s been enough of that already.)
Without details, the department said it was “considering accounting for differences in institutional characteristics such as degree and program mix and selectivity.”
There’s the rub. Harvard, MIT, Holy Cross, Hampshire, Salem State, Smith, the Boston Museum School, the Berklee College of Music and the Massachusetts Maritime Academy are hugely different. The handful of colleges like Harvard that can admit students without regard to need will present further important differences from those that can’t.
All things considered, the department must devote more thought to the task before it.
Online:
https://www.bostonherald.com
___
Dec. 30
Orange County Register, Santa Ana, California, on the rise of the “boardroom liberal”:
As President Obama has embraced the epithet “emperor” as an ironic “badge of honor,” Democrats are beginning to realize that an imperious mentality has been in their midst for years. In a talked-about new article at the New Republic, Noam Scheiber proclaimed a new kind of Democrat, the “boardroom liberal,” with Obama’s in-house guru, Valerie Jarrett, personifying the role.
Dutifully progressive on social matters, the boardroom liberal, nonetheless, is as much a creature of corporate culture as of the counterculture. In fact, Scheiber suggests, as the two have merged in the boardroom and the bureaucracy, a new kind of governing logic has emerged. Patronage is used by privileged operators to elicit big money and big favors, growing the influence and power of the elite while checking off politically correct policy boxes along the way.
Old-school, big-time corporate bosses were once reviled as “imperial CEOs.” But today, as Suzanne McGee argued in the Guardian, all-powerful boardroom liberals have shed the stigma by mastering the optics of proper caring. Corporate America is now dominated by the kind of perpetually teamworked and sensitivity-trained character found across our deeply liberal government bureaucracies. It’s no surprise that today’s elite put on a near-perfect performance of left-leaning cultural values. In the postmodern world they live in, the amount of money and lip service they pay to those values makes it impossible for anyone to judge whether they “truly” believe.
Furthermore, according to McGee, “the reason boardroom liberals need to exist at all is the fact that the social safety net that once existed has collapsed, and while some of that can probably be traced to waste and mismanagement, another giant chunk is simply due to lack of resources.”
As evidence, she points to the current level of tax revenue. Yet, she then points out how big business and big government both squander even the vastest of resources. In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg pledged $100 million for Newark’s public schools – “only to see most of that money vanish, as if into a sinkhole. The gift wasn’t terribly well thought-out, critics have said, and suffered most from its top-down nature and the lack of inclusion from the local community.”
These same criticisms go triple for a government-planned economy.
Online:
https://www.ocregister.com
___
Dec. 31
Khaleej Times, Dubai, on U.S. dealing with Russia:
After having offered an olive branch to Iran and Cuba, his biggest strategic challenge is how to bring back Vladimir Putin on congenial terms. That, however, is not going to happen anytime soon. The simple reason is that the Russian czar seems to be exhibiting brinkmanship, as he has pushed his country on a warpath with the West. The annexation of Crimea and a proactive role in supporting the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine have made him controversial enough to avoid rubbing shoulders with his Western counterparts. The hasty exit from Brisbane wherein he refused to face the world leaders for reasons best known to him exhibits the unease that has set in.
Now the US president, in an interview with National Public Radio, claimed that Putin’s adventurism has cost him his country’s economy. Obama said that the collapse of the rouble and the plunge that the economy has taken are evident of the fact that the Russian roulette didn’t work. Though Obama’s thrust was on making a point that he didn’t fall back in dealing with a resurgent leadership in Kremlin, that argument hasn’t helped in streamlining relations with Russia.
A plethora of sanctions that the US and the European Union have slapped are inadvertently hurting the Western economies, and the fall of oil prices and the widening of budget deficits of even prosperous countries is a case in point. Putin has already made it clear that he could somehow steer out of the rouble crisis, but it would be too hard for the West to put their houses in order if another recession sets in. This war of nerves between the West and Russia calls for a leadership dialogue, wherein the purpose shouldn’t be to castigate or belittle Russia, but to find a way out of the stalemate.
The crisis in Ukraine is one aspect of the entire discord, and at the same time there are other issues that should also come under the scanner, namely the restlessness of the states that sit on the borders with Europe and Russia, the refusal of EU membership to Turkey and last but not the least stalled progress on the missile defense shield and disarmament between Washington and Moscow. The setback that the global economy has seen in recent weeks warrants an immediate action to stop the new Cold War so that synergies are spent on development and investment rather than a new phase of militarization and warfare.
Online:
https://www.khaleejtimes.com