Why the Rich Don't Give to Charity

When Mort Zuckerman, the New York City real-estate and media mogul, lavished $200 million on Columbia University in December to endow the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, he did so with fanfare suitable to the occasion: the press conference was attended by two Nobel laureates, the president of the university, the mayor, and journalists from some of New York’s major media outlets. Many of the 12 other individual charitable gifts that topped $100 million in the U.S. last year were showered with similar attention: $150 million from Carl Icahn to the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, $125 million from Phil Knight to the Oregon Health & Science University, and $300 million from Paul Allen to the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, among them. If you scanned the press releases, or drove past the many university buildings, symphony halls, institutes, and stadiums named for their benefactors, or for that matter read the histories of grand giving by the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Stanfords, and Dukes, you would be forgiven for thinking that the story of charity in this country is a story of epic generosity on the part of the American rich.

Democracy Index 2013: Global Democracy At A Standstill, The Economist Intelligence Unit's Annual Report Shows

While some of the most oppressive parts of the world have made significant gains in democracy in the past year, the overall pace of democratic change remained stagnant in 2012. That is the conclusion of The Economist Intelligence Unit's recently published annual report on the state of global democracy for 2012.

"In 2012 global democracy was at a standstill in the sense that there was neither significant progress nor regression in levels of democracy worldwide," Laza Kekic, the main editor of the report, said in a press release.

Calvin Beisner, Evangelical Christian, Claims Environmentalism Great Threat To Civilization

A representative for an evangelical group that doesn't believe in man-made climate change has suggested that the modern environmental movement is harming civilization.

Speaking on the Janet Mefferd Show on March 18, Dr. Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance laid out four reasons why environmentalism is "the greatest threat to Western civilization."

Environmentalism is insidious, Beisnser explained, and it dangerously "speaks to the inherent spiritual yearnings of human souls and it provides plausible answers to dogged questions." It also incorporates the similarly dangerous threats of utopian Marxism, the secular humanism and the "religious fanaticism of jihad."

Small ACLU Team Fights Drone Strikes' Veil Of Secrecy

NEW YORK -- The Obama administration, in the face of harsh criticism from members of Congress, has recently promised more transparency surrounding the government's use of drones.

Yet long before the targeted-killing program threatened to derail the nomination of John Brennan to be director of the CIA, before Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) took to the Senate floor for an epic filibuster, a small team of lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union was fighting to pry more information about the use of unmanned aerial vehicles out of the administration. The handful of small steps the government has taken -- or been forced to take -- to increase oversight of the program hasn't satisfied them.

Hate Crimes Study Finds Nearly 2 In 3 Occurences Unreported

WASHINGTON -- Despite growing awareness of hate crimes, the share of those crimes reported to police has fallen in recent years as more victims of violent attacks express doubt that police can or will help.

Nearly 2 of 3 hate crimes go unreported to police, the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics reported Thursday. For the years 2003-06, 46 percent of hate crimes were reported to police. But more recently, in 2007-11, just 35 percent were reported.

Unreal Choices: On The Feminine Mystique

In an afterword to the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Feminine Mystique, the novelist Anna Quindlen recalls seeing her mother, a housewife, sitting at the kitchen table engrossed in the book. I have no comparable memory, but I did inherit my mother’s paperback copy of Betty Friedan’s 1963 manifesto, complete with underlining and exclamation points.

Rethinking Israel-Palestine: Beyond Bantustans, Beyond Reservations

As President Barack Obama embarks on his listening tour in the Middle East, he is likely to witness the impact of two decades of the Oslo peace process. Twenty years, dozens of summits and millions of dollars have brought Palestinians and Israel no closer to establishing a viable peace.

The US-brokered agreement has been associated with a mantra of establishing two states for two peoples, living side by side. In fact, Israel has existed as a state since 1948 and Palestinians have remained internally displaced within that state, exiled from it and occupied by it in adjacent territories. More significantly, Jewish Israelis and non-Jewish Palestinians, Israeli citizens and stateless civilians alike, are inextricably populated throughout a single territorial entity under Israeli control. The call for two states is really a call for the separation of two populations based on ethno-national homogeneity. The proposal has failed, not just because of a lack of accountability, but because it is fundamentally flawed. Like prescribing aspirin to deal with cancer, Oslo offered truncated self-rule as a prescription for Jewish-Israeli settler-colonialism and domination.

Kimani Gray: Guilty Until Proven Innocent

The only thing anyone can agree upon is that on Saturday, March 9, 16-year-old Kimani Gray was shot seven times by two New York Police Department officers in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. The police fired eleven shots. Four hit him in the front and side of his body, three in the back.
 
Gray’s mother says he and his friends were on their way back from a birthday party. Police saw a gang. A neighbor watching from a window says Gray was unarmed, and multiple witnesses say that Gray pleaded for his life. Police say he pulled a loaded gun. Some media reports say the officers were highly decorated for bravery. Other reports note that they had cost the department more than $215,000 in payouts for at least five lawsuits alleging civil rights violations. Police say they found a gun at the scene. A witness says she never saw a gun, and skeptics wonder whether it was a “drop” by corrupt officers.

On the Politics of ‘Scandal’

I freely admit I was late to the wackadoodle political party that is ABC’s Scandal, now hurtling toward a second-season finale on a TV screen near you. After all, it was created by Shonda Rhimes, who managed with Grey’s Anatomy to make both General Hospital and Paddy Chaevsky’s 1971 film screed The Hospital look like models of medical-drama accuracy and decorum. But in chronicling the exploits of Olivia Pope, a political operative-for-hire who has conducted a torrid affair with a married Republican president, Rhimes has built a show that can accommodate election rigging, assassination attempts, Supreme Court Justice–bullying and a gay chief-of-staff who’s married to an investigative reporter. Who would pass up all this for high-minded competition like CBS’ Sherlock Holmes pastiche Elementary? One of the best things about Scandal is that its multilayered storytelling and pacing are as sophisticated as any of the more classy, high-falutin’ cable shows like Mad Men or Game of Thrones.

Sneaky House Bill Would Gut Financial Reform

A bipartisan group of four representatives introduced a sneaky little bill Wednesday that would dismantle a huge chunk of the historic financial reform laws enacted after the financial crisis.

The Swap Jurisdiction Certainty Act, introduced by Reps. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.), Mike Conaway (R-Tex.), John Carney (D-Del.), and David Scott (D-Ga.), all of whom sit on the House Financial Services Committee, would allow big banks to shift risky activities to foreign subsidiaries in order to avoid US regulations. Part of the landmark 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act requires that derivatives—financial products whose value is based on things like currency exchange rates and crop prices—be traded in public marketplaces, instead of in private. The new bill could exempt foreign companies from these US derivatives rules, which sounds reasonable; the law purportedly just affects other countries. But what it would mean is that huge US-based banks that operate internationally could just do their paperwork through their international arms to avoid US regs, effectively gutting the section of Dodd-Frank that gave federal regulators the authority for the first time to regulate derivatives such as the credit default swaps that helped cause the 2007 bank failures.