“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.
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Robert Kuttner: Economy Sick, Politics Deadlocked? How About a Trade Deal!?
The economy faces a persistent budget crisis.
Pushback from Wall Street has gutted most of the banking reforms, unemployment is stuck around 8 percent, corporate profits have been soaring while there is no wage growth — and the newest White House proposal is… a free trade zone with Europe.
This idea of a Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Area was tossed in, reportedly at the last moment, to President Obama’s State of the Union, and is being promoted in the government’s latest report on trade.
You don’t know whether to laugh or cry. This is a classic case of changing the subject to a cause that will not address any of the economy’s deeper ills and could well worsen them.
Dean Baker: The Sequester Is President Obama’s Fault
Now that we are counting up the days of the sequester instead of counting down, it would be a good time to cast blame. And my candidate is President Obama.
I’m not blaming Obama for the reasons that Bob Woodward came up with in his fantasyland. I am blaming President Obama and his administration for trying to be cute and clever rather than telling the public the truth about the economic crisis. The result is that the vast majority of the public, and virtually all of the reporters and pundits who deal with budget issues, does not have any clue about where the deficit came from and why it is a virtue rather than a problem. [..]
But it was President Obama who decided to play deficit reduction games rather than being truthful about the state of the economy. There was no reason to expect better from the Republicans in Congress, we had reason to hope that President Obama would act responsibly.
Steven Brill’s article in Time Magazine about the cost of private health care is likely to make most of his readers very angry. Angry about the prices we pay, about the lives that are devastated, and about the fact that we’re one of the few developed countries without adequate health care for its citizens.
Economists have told us that the profit motive of privatization comes with an “invisible hand” that automatically corrects inequities in the market. It hasn’t worked that way for health care. The personal stories recounted below, and some additional facts to complement them, make it clear that an essential human need has been turned into a product that benefits a few people at the expense of many others. [..]
By treating the essential human need of health care as a product, the hospitals and doctors and drug companies and insurance companies and equipment suppliers are lured toward a pot of money, with little regard for the effects of their profit-making on average Americans.
The solution, of course, is Medicare for all. If, that is, the invisible hand of the market ever reaches out to average Americans.
Desmond Tutu: Nuclear Weapons Must Be Eradicated for all Our Sakes
No nation should own nuclear arms – not Iran, not North Korea, and not their critics who take the moral high ground
We cannot intimidate others into behaving well when we ourselves are misbehaving. Yet that is precisely what nations armed with nuclear weapons hope to do by censuring North Korea for its nuclear tests and sounding alarm bells over Iran’s pursuit of enriched uranium. According to their logic, a select few nations can ensure the security of all by having the capacity to destroy all.
John Nichols: If Switzerland Can Crack Down on CEOs, Why Not the US?
Does anyone seriously doubt that, if America had the same national referendum system that Switzerland does, voters in the United States would vote just as aggressively as the Swiss have to curb CEO abuses?
Actually, the 68 percent support for Sunday’s Swiss referendum that gives shareholders broad new powers to curb excessive pay for bankers and corporate executives might well be shy of the mark that the US could hit.
Polls of American voters have regularly shown that over 70 percent favor restrictions on executive compensation, with even self-identified conservatives registering majority support for clamping down on CEOs.
Tom Engelhardt: Climate Change as History’s Deal-Breaker
(or Where Is Everybody?) Why It’s So Tough to Get Your Head Around Climate Change
Two Sundays ago, I traveled to the nation’s capital to attend what was billed as “the largest climate rally in history” and I haven’t been able to get the experience — or a question that haunted me — out of my mind. Where was everybody? [..]
Sixty environmental and other organizations were backing the demonstration, including the Sierra Club with its hundreds of thousands of members. Given what was potentially at stake, it never crossed my mind that the turnout wouldn’t be substantial. In fact, on that frigid day, lots of demonstrators did turn up. Evidently, they knew the dirty little secret of such events: that much talk would precede a modest amount of walking and inventive slogan shouting. So they arrived — poured in actually — late, and in real numbers.
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