Pondering the Pundits

“Pondering 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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Paul Krugman: Seduced and Betrayed by Donald Trump

Donald Trump won the Electoral College (though not the popular vote) on the strength of overwhelming support from working-class whites, who feel left behind by a changing economy and society. And they’re about to get their reward — the same reward that, throughout Mr. Trump’s career, has come to everyone who trusted his good intentions. Think Trump University.

Yes, the white working class is about to be betrayed.

The evidence of that coming betrayal is obvious in the choice of an array of pro-corporate, anti-labor figures for key positions. In particular, the most important story of the week — seriously, people, stop focusing on Trump Twitter — was the selection of Tom Price, an ardent opponent of Obamacare and advocate of Medicare privatization, as secretary of health and human services. This choice probably means that the Affordable Care Act is doomed — and Mr. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters will be among the biggest losers.

Eugene Robinson: Trump will helm a government of, by and for corporate America

Donald Trump promised to punish U.S. companies that ship manufacturing jobs out of the country. Instead, judging from the way he has handled the Carrier Corp. matter, he plans to reward them. Quite handsomely, in fact.

As should be standard practice with Trump, pay attention to the substance, not the theater. United Technologies, the parent company of air-conditioner-maker Carrier, has been threatening to move more than 2,000 jobs from Indiana to Mexico. Trump addressed this specifically during his campaign, vowing to hit the company with a punitive tariff.

“If they’re going to fire all their people, move their plant to Mexico, build air conditioners, and think they’re going to sell those air conditioners to the United States — there’s going to be a tax,” Trump said on “Meet the Press” in the summer. “It could be 25 percent, it could be 35 percent, it could be 15 percent, I haven’t determined.”

As it turns out, how about zero percent?

Anthea Butler: I’m on the ‘professor watchlist.’ It’s a ploy to undermine free speech

The release of the professor watchlist, purporting to expose professors who discriminate against conservative students, is anything but that. I should know: I’m on it.

As one of a handful of religion professors in the US who study, write and teach about conservative Christianity and politics, I am all too aware of the real meaning of the list, and of its purpose. Promoted by Turning Point USA, the list is not simply designed to expose professors who discriminate; it is designed to silence and smear. And it helps feed information and screeds to similar sites like the College Fix and Campus Reform, which states that they are “a watchdog to the nation’s higher education system” to “expose bias and abuse on the nations college campuses”.

Charles Kirk, a young leader in conservative politics, who is the publisher of the list and co founder of Turning Point USA, stated that he hopes that the professor watchlist will change campus culture by highlighting previously reported incidences and statements. It very well might. Turning Point USA has chapters on over 300 college campuses across the United States, and even more on high school campuses.

For a group claiming to be a watchdog to higher education, the organization is training students from high school in how to not engage their education critically, but to combat anything or anyone that does not promote or teach with a conservative viewpoint. It is an all-out bid to control not only academic freedom in the university setting, but to create a hostile climate for free speech and academic freedom

Steven Rattner: Trump’s Chaos Theory: A Single Tweet Causes Jobs To Return

Donald J. Trump spent much of his campaign peddling hope to beleaguered working-class Americans that, on his watch, those old-fashioned, good-paying manufacturing jobs would come back to America.

On Thursday, the president-elect was in Indiana to celebrate the news that the Carrier Corporation will move only 1,300 jobs to Mexico, not 2,100 as planned. That’s not bringing jobs back to the United States; they are just leaving more slowly.

Manufacturing employment in the United States peaked at 19.6 million in June 1979; today, 12.3 million Americans work in factories. Even during the economic recovery, amid proclamations of a renaissance in American manufacturing, production jobs barely grew. So far in 2016, they have fallen by 62,000, even as 1.8 million new jobs were created.

The lesson: You can’t fight a vast tide with a Twitter account.

Timothy Egan: Fake Cowboys and Real Indians

For most of this past week, a winter storm has lashed at the North Dakota prairie camp where the Standing Rock Sioux are making a stand to keep an oil pipeline away from water that is a source of life for them.

The sight of native people shivering in a blizzard, while government authorities threaten to starve them out or forcefully remove them, is a living diorama of so much awful history between the First Americans and those who took everything from them.

The authorities have brought water cannons, rubber bullets, tear gas, helicopters and dogs against what has become one of the largest gatherings of tribes, from all nations, in a century. They’ve given the protesters, who will soon include a brigade of veterans, until Dec. 5 to disperse.

Now flash back a few years to another Western standoff, the Nevada siege of Cliven Bundy, the deadbeat rancher who drew heavily armed white militia members to defend a man who stiffed the government while grazing his cattle on public land. There, the feds backed off.