News for June 30

Coups and Courts edition

Xenia News & Analysis, by the way, is a Michael Jackson news-free zone, since I’m pretty sure Xenia followers have no trouble whatsover finding event the tiniest iota of information, comments and blogs about the mega popstar’s death. I’ll have something to say about the media coverage over in Voices of Xenia shortly.

Meanwhile, on with the news.

What you might have missed while cable news stations were dedicated to covering Jackson’s death from every angle were a military coup in Honduras this weekend that took President Manuel Zelaya out of power, and on Monday the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that white firefighters in Connecticut were subjected to discrimination when their city threw out a hiring test on which black candidates had performed poorly. That decision overturned a ruling made by Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor, prompting discussion about the intersection of race, law and politics. The coup on Honduras, meanwhile, is creating more criticism about how the U.S. media is covering events from afar.

Crisis in Honduras

Honduran soldiers stand in front of government offices. Photo by rbreve/Flickr, used in CC license

The New York Times |  “The United States has long had strong ties to the Honduras military and helps train Honduran military forces. Those close ties have put the Obama administration in a difficult position, opening it up to accusations that it may have turned a blind eye to the pending coup. Administration officials strongly deny the charges, and Mr. Obama’s quick response to the Honduran president’s removal has differed sharply from the actions of the Bush administration, which in 2002 offered a rapid, tacit endorsement of a short-lived coup against Mr. Chávez.”

Alterdestiny |  “Widespread condemnation from the international community and rising pressure from labor unions and the poor could plunge Honduras into crisis pretty quickly. With Barack Obama, the EU, and Hugo Chavez all opposing the Honduran military, it’s hard to see how the coup can survive. Honduras has been a US client state for decades. Banana companies controlled the country in the early 20th century. It was the home of the Contras when they organized to launch against the Sandinistas. Today, it is a major center of maquiladoras. So there is a long American tradition of exercising power here. Given this history, can the military hold up in the face of real U.S. opposition? Much I think depends on what the U.S. opposition looks like. If Obama backs this up with some economic reprisals, decline in aid, etc., I think the coup falls apart in a heartbeat. If not, it might survive.”

Figgy |  “Now, about this protest. I have to be honest about this, too. You know how I know it was happening? Because CNN Spanish was showing it. No local news channels were showing images. CNN SPanish finally had a reporter on the ground, and she was very emphatic saying that the crowds were NOT in the thousands, and that the police had NOT provoked them. And then the CNN signal cut off. That was bad. If the new government wants to look fair, they really cannot keep cutting off the flow of information. That is pretty bad. But Tegucigalpa is a tiny city, so the news spread fast. the crowds DID disperse pretty quickly.

“After that, it was fairly quiet. We still have a 9pm-6am curfew. But through this all we’re hearing CNN interviewing Zelaya and Hugo Chavez saying how he’ll do anything to get Zelaya back into power. Do you know how terrifying that is to hear? When people here are trying to get back to their normal lives, when Congress is doing everything legally (after the coup and the “resignation” of course)? It’s not RIGHT, dammit, that Zelaya keeps saying he’ll come back at the head of an army or whatever, and we’re sitting here just…waiting for this to go down peacefully. Information is so very confusing, is my point. But I’m speaking from my heart, and I am being as rational as I can.”

The Brookings Institution |  “Now the Honduran military have responded in kind: an illegal referendum has met an illegal military intervention, with the avowed intention of protecting the constitution. Moreover, as has been so often the case, this intervention has been called for and celebrated by Zelaya’s civilian opponents. For the past week, the Honduran Congress has waxed lyrical about the armed forces as the guarantors of the constitution, a disturbing notion in Latin America. When we hear that, we can expect the worst. And the worst has happened. At the very least, we are witnessing in Honduras the return of the sad role of the military as the ultimate referee in the political conflicts amongst the civilian leadership, a huge step back in the consolidation of democracy.”

Beautiful Horizons |  “What I can gather about Zelaya is that he may very well have overreached and that he had made a lot of enemies. There is, however, a solution for this: laws. Given the region’s literally tortured history, the military should never ever take a role in deciding who is in power except to restore a legitimately elected government.”

• Related link: In Pictures  |  BBC News

The Politics of Ricci

RaceWire |  “In the view of the court’s narrow majority, the exam proved the white firefighters’ merit, and the city unjustly denied them opportunity. But if the quality of the test, as the city contended, was too weak to withstand a legal challenge on civil rights grounds, then what kind of merit did the court reward? How does society weigh those scores against the burden of historical injustice?”

Obsidian Wings |  “To step back, Ricci doesn’t really turn on all the various complex legal doctrines that you’ve probably read about.  When you scrape away the legalese (i.e., the Matrix), the case is really about one’s political opinion of certain remedies for historical racial discrimination.  Conservatives like Roberts don’t really (in their heart of hearts) think racial discrimination is a problem anymore.  Innocent white people can’t keep paying the price for crimes their ancestors committed.

“Others, like Ginsburg, view the issue more historically.  They don’t see racial discrimination in terms of the personal moral failings of our ancestors, but as deep structural harms whose legacy lives on and must be addressed.  It’s like a river that has carved a deep canyon over centuries.  Even when the water gets turned off, the canyon remains.

“That’s what Ricci is about.  The legal doctrine is simply a mask for this political fight.”

The Daily Beast |  “Unlike Scalia and Alito, I don’t think it’s avoidable or disturbing that white male judges find it easy to empathize with white male litigants. What’s disturbing is that they do think it’s avoidable—and therefore they also believe it’s both legally and politically irrelevant that 106 of the Supreme Court’s 110 justices have been white males.”

Adam Serwer @Ta-Nehisi Coates |  “The problem with the conservatives Justice’s reasoning–in particular Sam Alito’s preoccupation with politicians being concerned with the interests of black voters–is that it removes racial discrimination from all historical context. This is not like the kind of pervasive, deliberate, racial discrimination that was once a staple of hiring for municipal jobs, nor is it like residual systemic discrimination that favors candidates with certain external advantages that have nothing to do with ability. Throwing out the tests was, instead, the result of the city being careless in how it composed the test–unfair to those who studied for it, not just because promotions were denied, but because the test was flawed to begin with. There’s no getting around the fact that Frank Ricci was wronged–but in my view, the city wronged everyone who took the test, period.”

The League of Ordinary Gentlemen |  “I am afraid for my country. This country has a permanent black underclass; Hispanic economic mobility is not much better. Decades of affirmative action have done little to fix that. Now, we appear ready to abandon those attempts to level the playing field entirely. Of course, principles and ideals are important. But my question is open, and I apply it to the most thoughtful opponents of affirmative action and the most rabid and unthinking alike: what are the effects, for our country, of a permanent racial achievement divide? And can we reasonably expect to maintain a peaceful and just society with such a gap between the races?

“And how long can we continue to pretend that these questions aren’t staring us in the face, or that they don’t matter?”