Editorial voices from elsewhere
Excerpts from recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad as compiled by the Associated Press:
Is fast food so vital to the nation that taxpayers should spend $7 billion a year to supplement the industry’s profits? Imagine the outcry if that was proposed.
And yet a study by economists at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and the University of California at Berkeley’s Labor Center says it’s already happening.
Seven billion dollars a year is what it costs taxpayers for Medicaid, food stamps and the other public assistance programs for fast-food workers who are paid poverty-level wages.
A second report, “Super-Sizing Public Costs” by the National Employment Law Project, said low wages and missing benefits at the 10 largest fast-food companies in the country cost taxpayers about $3.8 billion a year.
Another way to look at it: McDonald’s posted $1.5 billion in third-quarter profits. Taxpayers paid $1.2 billion last year for public assistance to the McDonald’s workforce. That’s $300 million per quarter, a 20 percent contribution to the company’s bottom line.
By under-paying employees, companies push their real cost of doing business onto the public at large. This can be called corporate welfare. Or socialism. But not capitalism.
Fast-food workers should be paid a living wage. The corporations that hire them must stop relying on the public for anything more than buying the occasional burger.
What’s going on at the National Security Agency sounds more like spies gone wild than the product of good governance.
Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s previous revelations about NSA surveillance of Americans raised questions about whether this agency was operating on a because-we-can basis without suitable adult supervision. Those doubts are intensifying as the White House seeks plausible deniability about massive sweeps of information from dozens of world leaders.
Someone besides the spies ought to be making the decisions about when surveillance serves a national security interest and when it merely amounts to gratuitously vacuuming up vast amounts of information.
The United States has vast and sophisticated surveillance capabilities which are immeasurably valuable in keeping the country safe. Good intelligence is crucial in a world where terrorists remain intent on doing us harm. High-tech snooping to assure national security is essential, but eavesdropping in order to gain a foreign policy or trade edge is a misuse of our capabilities.
Notwithstanding budget constraints, Washington is busy building a new air base near the Black Sea. The United States plans to take over a Romanian airfield and station as many as 1,500 American troops there.
The multipurpose facility has raised many eyebrows, and it is feared that apart from training and logistics purposes, the base might also be used as a detention center in the heart of Europe. Last but not the least, the new base in Romania will house the controversial U.S. ballistic missile defense system. It will also be home to interceptor missiles and radar equipment.
Although the U.S. has said that the base will not be used for aggressive purposes, there is no dearth of skeptics who believe that it is meant to counter Iran’s ambitious missile and nuclear program.
Human Rights Watch sees the Romanian base as the possible location of a clandestine CIA jail, and probably an espionage barracks, to further the controversial war on terrorism. With America’s allies in a suspicious mood since the National Security Agency’s sleuths have gone over the top, it is feared that this strategic realignment in Europe will also be seen with mistrust.