“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”.
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Joseph Stiglitz: Climate Change and Poverty: The Post-Crisis Crises
An economic and political system that does not deliver for most citizens is one that is not sustainable in the long run
In the shadow of the euro crisis and America’s fiscal cliff, it is easy to ignore the global economy’s long-term problems. But, while we focus on immediate concerns, they continue to fester, and we overlook them at our peril.
The most serious is global warming. While the global economy’s weak performance has led to a corresponding slowdown in the increase in carbon emissions, it amounts to only a short respite. And we are far behind the curve: because we have been so slow to respond to climate change achieving the targeted limit of a 2C rise in global temperature will require sharp reductions in emissions in the future.
Some suggest that, given the economic slowdown, we should put global warming on the backburner. On the contrary, retrofitting the global economy for climate change would help to restore aggregate demand and growth.
John Nichols: When the Great Judgment Call Came, Hagel Handed Bush a Blank Check
If President Obama is determined to select a former senator to serve as secretary of defense, the ideal pick would be someone who at the very least saw through the flimsy arguments for authorizing George Bush’s war with Iraq.
That excludes Chuck Hagel, the Vietnam veteran and former Republican senator who Obama has tapped for the Pentagon post. [..]
When the neocons rally on one side, it can lead liberals (and even some progressives) to instinctually go to the other side. And that’s happening with the Hagel nomination. To be sure, liberals will find Hagel pronouncements that are appealing, such as his assertion in his autobiography: “Not that I’m a pacifist, I’m a hard-edged realist, I understand the world as it is, but war is a terrible thing. There’s no glory, only suffering,” And a 2011 reflection on his own Vietnam service, in which Hagel said: “We sent home almost 16,000 body bags that year [1968]. And I always thought to myself, ‘If I get through this, if I have the opportunity to influence anyone, I owe it to those guys to never let this happen again to the country.'”
Throughout much of the United States, cell phone service is terrible (so is broadband, as Susan Crawford shows). And not just in rural or sparsely populated areas, but cell phone calls routinely drop in major metropolitan areas. You can’t use your phone underground in New York, and there are plenty of places on Capitol Hill you can’t get service. I actually once had trouble getting service near the Federal Communications Commission. This is a result of a lack of competition and increasingly poor regulatory policies. In the late 1990s, 50 percent of wireless revenues were invested in wireless infrastructure. By 2009, that number dropped to a little over 10 percent. What is it today? We don’t know, because the FCC no longer even collects the data. The result is that your cell phone drops calls. Cell phone service is also expensive, and the companies nickel and dime you — America is one of two countries where the person receiving the call has to pay for the call. A rough calculation shows that up to 80 percent of the cost of your cell phone service comes from corruption. [..]
Antitrust is the core problem here. Without restraint on behavior, corporate executives will work to grab as much market and political power as possible, because only market power and political power allows them to have pricing leverage without investment, risk, or innovation. Competition is the enemy of these businessmen. America has a long tradition of monopoly power and anti-monopoly sentiment and activism. From the progressive era of Teddy Roosevelt to the early 1980s, America had a strong tradition of antitrust regulation rooted in the understanding that too much market power led to inefficiency and price gouging. This tradition ended under Reagan. [..]
E. J. Dionne, Jr.: The Real Deficit Argument
Should our politicians dedicate themselves to solving the problems we face now? Or should they spend their time constructing largely theoretical deficit solutions for years far in the future to satisfy certain ideological and aesthetic urges?
This is one of the two central choices the country faces at the beginning of President Obama’s second term. The other is related: Will the establishment, including business leaders and middle-of-the-road journalistic opinion, stand by silently as one side in the coming argument risks cratering the economy in an effort to reverse the verdict of the 2012 election? Yes, I am talking about using the debt ceiling as a political tool, something that was never done until the disaster of 2011.
My first questions are, admittedly, loaded. They refer to a difference of opinion we need to face squarely.
Wendell Potter: One of the Most Helpful Parts of ObamaCare Just Kicked In, Despite Fierce Opposition From Insurers
You probably missed it because of the media’s focus on the fiscal cliff, but a provision of ObamaCare took effect on January 1 that can help you avoid making costly mistakes when you sign up for health insurance. At the very least you’ll be able to understand what you’re actually signing up for.
From now on, health insurers will have to provide us with information in plain English, and in no more than four pages, about what their policies cover and how much we’ll have to pay out of our own pockets when we get sick. And they’ll have to provide it in a standard format that will enable us to make apples-to-apples comparisons among health plans. Click [here v] to see an example of what the plan descriptions must now look like.
As you can imagine, insurers fought hard to kill that part of the law. That’s because they’ve profited for years by using legalese and gobbledygook in describing their policies, and also by purposely withholding information we really need to make informed coverage decisions.
Ralph Nader: Who Can Stop the People?
If your next-door neighbors were the U.S. Congress, spending your income and using their power to influence your life, would you pay close attention to them?
Over the past several weeks, Congress has been the focal point of much controversy for its inability to come together on a comprehensive fiscal cliff deal until the absolute final hour. More and more Americans are becoming aware — and upset — about the systemic gridlock in Congress, which results in the failure to solve or even address numerous major problems that plague our country. Issues such as the stagnant minimum wage, the bloated military budget, undeclared wars, the corporate crime wave, the business plunder of Medicare, corporate welfare sprees and many others. Consider the governing power that Congress possesses — the power to raise or lower taxes, the power to spend, the power to declare war, the power to give away your public lands, airwaves, and taxpayer dollars to wealthy corporations looking to widen their profit margins, the power to investigate and hold hearings, the power to oversee the executive branch, the power to impeach, and the power to confirm cabinet nominees and federal judges. Congress is the most powerful branch of government which is why it’s the branch with the most dire need for citizen oversight.
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