Links worth reading

David Minzer pens an absolutely must-read piece on the military intervention in Libya

Top military brass claims that drones create more terrorists than they kill


And here are a bunch of links I assembled back in December but forgot to publish:
Amanda Gailey on how gun enthusiasts believe government has run amok with power, then support the government in killing unarmed black men.

Marcy Wheeler makes the case that the CIA torture program successfully met all of its goals, none of which were creating accurate intelligence.

CIA was recently forced to declassify a large trove of documents; here is one detailing their involvement in starting a brutal 50-year-long civil war in Guatemala. (h/t Cora Currier) 

Connor Friedersdorf on epidemic rates of domestic violence in United States police officer families.

Over at Jacobin vox.com, Dylan Matthews makes the case for abolishing all immigration restrictions.

"Watch this video of an armed, drunk, disobedient white man -- and his encounter with the cops. Something seem odd?"

Financial criminals have been paid billions, but they rarely pay.

On the multi-billion dollar textbook and standardized test industry:

This is because standardized tests are not based on general knowledge. As I learned in the course of my investigation, they are based on specific knowledge contained in specific sets of books: the textbooks created by the test makers...Put simply, any teacher who wants his or her students to pass the tests has to give out books from the Big Three publishers.

And only wealthy schools can afford these textbooks

Links worth reading

What have I been reading over the last month?

• Glenn Greenwald on media propaganda surrounding drone victims
• Jed Rakoff on how our criminal justice system forces innocent people plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit 
• SWAT team blows hole in chest of 2-year-old for no reason, consequence free
• Al-Jazeera on voter suppression in the United States
• Obama administration sides with employer in flagrant wage theft case
• Glenn Greenwald on American media propaganda reporting on Latin America
• Alana Semuels on National Nurses United
• Glenn Greenwald asks: How many Muslim countries has the United States bombed or occupied since 1980? ("Reflecting their single-minded obsession with demonizing Muslims...they notably neglect to note thriving gay communities in places like Beirut and Istanbul, or the lack of them in Christian Uganda.")
• Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain on the horrific conditions of post-intervention Libya

Links worth reading: Jacobin edition

Jeff Bryant on the (predictably) broken promises of the charter school movement

Glenn Greenwald on the American political class's lurching from supporting dictatorship, then democracy, then back again to dictatorship in Egypt

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The next issue of Jacobin is due out very soon. It sure seems longer than 3 months since the last issue of Jacobin was sent out. To hold you over until the next issue, here are some of my favorites from Jacobin so far:

Megan Erickson - The Strike that Didn't Change New York
Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones - Bad Science
Pankaj Mehta - There's a Gene for That
Seth Ackerman & Mike Beggs - Don't Mention the War
Gavin Mueller - The Rise of the Machines
Penny Lewis - The Myth of the Hardhat Hawk

Links worth reading: Obama's very busy week

Obama destroys lives of 70,000 people in exchange for a few votes from white people

• [O]ne longtime activist burst into tears when asked how the decision might affect his friends and family.
• To wait nine more weeks means the President has agreed to deport more than 70,000 people, more than 1,100 every day, and continues cementing his legacy as the Deporter-in-Chief.

3 more years of war in Iraq

• For those who favor air strikes: if, as most regional and military experts predict, it turns out that airstrikes are insufficient to seriously degrade ISIS, would you then favor a ground invasion?...For those who keep running around beating their chests talking about the imperative to “destroy ISIS”: will that take more or less time than it’s taken to “destroy the Taliban”? Does it ever occur to such flamboyant warriors to ask why those sorts of groups enjoy so much support, and whether yet more bombing of predominantly Muslim countries – and/or flooding the region with more weapons – will bolster rather than subvert their strength?
• Is Obama’s new plan something he genuinely believes in? Or does he recognize it’s stupid, and is just doing it for the optics? There’s a dismal precedent for the latter option: His decision to extend what he knew was a dead-end war in Afghanistan for two years because of the bellicose promises he’d made in order to look tough during his first political campaign. That time, he traded about 1,300 American lives for optics.

Links worth reading

Dylan Matthews article on how prisons can be phased out raises (obvious) questions about the goals of our criminal justice system

David Bernstein and Noah Isackson on how the Chicago Police Department, under pressure from the mayor's office, doctors crime statistics (part 1, part 2) (alternate title: Hey hey, ho ho, Rahm Emanuel's got to go)

Matthew Yglesias on how it's three times cheaper to simply give homeless people housing than it is to keep them on the streets--raising (obvious) questions about the goals of our antipoverty policies.

Links worth reading

I'm working on a few posts right now, but I wanted to post a couple things I've come across that I think are worth reading, but probably won't be able to use.

First, a surprisingly thorough summary of criticism of Burkhauser et al's paper arguing that inequality has decreased from 1979-2007 by Tom Edsall.  Edsall reached out to a huge number of economists of different leanings and put together a surprisingly comprehensive round-up of reactions.