“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
Dylan Ratigan: Free Market Fraud
At first glance, the December jobs report seems to be a step in the right direction. An unemployment rate of 9.4 percent, the lowest level in 19 months. And a president, happy to boast about another 103,000 jobs being created last month.
However, renowned economist Peter Morici points out two important caveats. For one, 260,000 Americans simply dropped out of the labor force in December. They are out of work, yet no longer counted as unemployed by the government. And secondly, 103,000 jobs is nowhere near the number of jobs we need to be adding each month. To bring unemployment down to 6 percent by 2013, businesses need to hire an average of 350,000 new workers each month.
Even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who continues to defend his Quantitative Easing (aka money-printing) program, couldn’t ignore the writing on the wall during a Senate hearing Friday morning. “If we continue at this pace”, said Bernanke, “we are not going to see sustained declines to the unemployment rate.”
Daphne Eviatar: Is Proxy Detention the Obama Administration’s Extraordinary Rendition-Lite?
Shortly after taking office, President Obama announced he’d close CIA prisons and end abusive interrogations of terrorism suspects by U.S. officials. But the Obama administration has notably preserved the right to continue “renditions” — the abduction and transfer of suspects to U.S. allies in its “war on terror,” including allies notorious for the use of torture.
Although the Obama administration in 2009 promised to monitor more closely the treatment of suspects it turned over to foreign prisons, the disturbing case of Gulet Mohamed, an American teenager interrogated under torture in Kuwait, casts doubt on the effectiveness of those so-called “diplomatic assurances.” It’s also raised questions about whether the “extraordinary rendition” program conducted by the Bush administration has now been transformed into an equally abusive proxy detention program run by its successor.
Glenn Greenwald: Daley is a reflection, not a cause
Few things interest me less at this point than royal court personnel changes. I actually agree with the pro-Obama/Democratic-Party-loyal commentators who insist it doesn’t much matter who becomes White House Chief of Staff because it’s Obama who drives administration policy. Obama didn’t do what he did in the first two years because Rahm Emanuel was his Chief of Staff. That view has the causation reversed: he chose Emanuel for that position because that’s who Obama is. Similarly, installing JP Morgan’s Midwest Chairman, a Boeing director, and a long-time corporatist — Bill Daley — as a powerful underling replacing Emanuel isn’t going to substantively change anything Obama does. It’s just another reflection of the Obama presidency, its priorities and concerns, and its overarching allegiances.
There’s a section of my forthcoming book about the rule of law which examines the direct causal line between the vast number of Wall Street officials in key administration positions and the full-scale exemption from accountability which financial elites enjoy even for the most egregious lawbreaking. When you compile all of those appointments in one place, the absolute stranglehold large-scale corporate interests exert over virtually all realms of government policy is quite striking. But it’s nothing more than what the economist Nouriel Roubini meant when he told the makers of the 2010 documentary “Inside Job” that Wall Street has “captured the political system” on “the Democratic and the Republican side” alike, or what Simon Johnson describes as “The Quiet Coup”: “The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against” elite business interests.
Michelle Chen: Flunks Women’s Health
Kids might dread that report card that comes every winter, but a nationwide report card on women’s health doesn’t make officials nearly as anxious as it should.
According to the National Women’s Law Center’s latest report card on state and national health policy, no state got a “satisfactory” (S) grade on the group’s selected health measures, and only Vermont and Massachussetts scored an S-minus. The many “F” states were concentrated in the Southeast, such as Mississippi. The nation as a whole got a big “U” (unsatisfactory), with passing marks in only three key areas:
the percentage of women age 40 and older across the country getting mammograms regularly, the percentage of women visiting the dentist annually and the percentage of women age 50 and older who receive screenings for colorectal cancer.
William Rivers Pitt: This Is Going to Suck
The American people were treated on Thursday to a (mostly) full and complete reading of the Constitution of the United States from the floor of the House of Representatives. The performance was proposed and organized by the new Republican majority in that chamber for the purpose – according to them, anyway – of announcing that America is about to start going back to being America again. There’s an irony in this, insofar as they chose to skip the Constitutional parts about African Americans not really being people. That portion of the document is a vital part of our shared history, so yeah, leave it to the GOP to to snip, redact and edit our founding document, even if it’s just in a bit of political theater.
A friend astutely observed that this reading of the Constitution was an essentially meaningless act without including a recitation of the complementary documents and supporting arguments; i.e. it is akin to reading the owner’s manual of a car, but not knowing how the thing really works once you open up the hood. Within my friend’s opinion, however, lies a hidden solution to what is going to be, in my estimation, a truly messy and dangerous 112th Congressional session: make them read everything, up to and including the Federalist Papers. By the time they get through it all, this congressional session will have run its course, and a great deal of damage will have been averted.
Alexander Cockburn: The American Way of Torture
Just over the edge of 2011 and this fresh new decade, torture is now solidly installed in America’s repressive arsenal. Not in the shadows where it has always lurked, but up front and central, vigorously applauded by prominent politicians. Rituals of coercion and humiliation seep through the culture, to the extent that before Christmas, American travelers began to rebel at the invasive pat-down searches conducted by the TSA’s airport security teams groping around bosoms and crotches. . . . .
The torture system is flourishing, and the boundaries of the American empire marked by overseas torture centers such as Bagram. There are still detainees in Guantanamo — as of November last year, 174 of them. They are supposedly destined for a Supermax in Illinois.
For the past seven months 23-year-old U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning, first in an Army prison in Kuwait; now in Quantico, Va., has been held 23 hours out of 24 in solitary confinement in his cell, under constant harassment. He faces months, if not years, of the same. Will he end up like accused Chicagoan Jose Padilla, four years in total isolation and silence before his trial in 2007 (convicted as a terrorist and given 17 years), with his lawyer informed by prison staff that Padilla had become docile and inactive to the point that he resembled “a piece of furniture.”
Johann Hari David Cameron Is Selling Off All England’s Forests — and Starting to Drill, Baby, Drill
Can you hear the silence of the huskies? When he was rebranding the Tory party, David Cameron promised us he would lead “the greenest government ever”, and flew to the Arctic to be photographed hugging the Arctic dogs.
Since he came to power, he has broken every environmental promise he made — and then gone much further. He has opened up the coasts of Britain to the deep-sea drilling that worked so well in the Gulf of Mexico, and put a For Sale sign outside every single remaining forest in England. Yes, as his own environment minister puts it, Cameron is determined to achieve “disposal of public forest” — and the timber companies and holiday-parks are preparing their opening bids.
Michael McCarthy: Nature Studies by Michael McCarthy: Have we learned nothing since ‘Silent Spring’?
Nicotine, found in tobacco, is a deadly substance – and not only for smokers. It has long been known as a powerful natural insecticide, and its presence in the tobacco crop has evolved to deter pests; it is toxic to virtually all of them (except one, the Carolina sphinx moth, whose fat green caterpillar, known in the US as the tobacco hornworm, has evolved a way of dealing with it).
Nicotine is a neurotoxin, that is, it attacks the insect nervous system. In recent years, pesticide companies such as the German giant Bayer have developed a group of compounds which act in a similar way; they have been christened neonicotinoids (“new nicotine-like things”). Neonicotinoids are now among the most widely-used insecticides because they are very effective, and they are effective because they are “systemic”. That means that they do not simply sit on the plant’s surface but are taken up into the plant itself, so that any part of it becomes toxic to the aphid or other troublesome wee beastie attempting to feed upon it.
Unfortunately, when we say “any part”, that is literally true: not only the stem and the leaves are contaminated but so, even at the heart of the plant’s flowers, are its pollen and its nectar. And when pollinating insects come along to gather them, such as honeybees, bumblebees, solitary bees, moths, butterflies, or hoverflies, which are by no means the “target” species of the insecticide, they get a shot of poison nonetheless. They may get a tiny shot. But each time they buzz to a contaminated flower for more pollen or nectar, they get another one. And another one. And another one.
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