“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.
Gail Collins: Waiting for Somebody
Let’s talk for a minute about education.
Already, I can see readers racing for the doors. This is one of the hardest subjects in the world to write about. Many, many people would rather discuss … anything else. Sports. Crazy Tea Party candidates. Crop reports.
So kudos to the new documentary “Waiting for Superman” for ratcheting up the interest level. It follows the fortunes of five achingly adorable children and their hopeful, dedicated, worried parents in Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C., as they try to gain entrance to high-performing charter schools. Not everybody gets in, and by the time you leave the theater you are so sad and angry you just want to find something to burn down.
Robert Scheer The Big Guy’s on Our Side
Paul Volcker, or the “big guy,” as President Barack Obama refers to the former Federal Reserve chair who heads his Economic Recovery Advisory Board, nailed it in a series of blistering remarks on the sorry state of our economy. But what he said was even tougher than was indicated by the media’s scattergun reporting on his speech last Thursday to the Chicago Fed. Thanks to Reuters, which posted the video coverage online, it is possible to take the full measure of his concern over where we are and how we got here.
Volcker warned that “the financial system is broken. … We know that parts of it are absolutely broken, like the mortgage market, which only happens to be the most important part of our capital markets [and has] become a subsidiary of the U.S. government.” That sentence was quoted in brief mentions of the speech in The New York Times and other leading news outlets but not so his explanation of how this was allowed to happen: “I don’t think anybody doubts that the underlying problem in the markets is this too-big-to-fail syndrome, bailout and all the rest.”
Michael Moore: Dwight Was Right
So…it turns out President Eisenhower wasn’t making up all that stuff about the military-industrial complex.
That’s what you’ll conclude if you read Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s War. (You can read excerpts of it here, here and here.) You thought you voted for change when you cast a ballot for Barack Obama? Um, not when it comes to America occupying countries that don’t begin with a “U” and an “S.”
In fact, after you read Woodward’s book, you’ll split a gut every time you hear a politician or a government teacher talk about “civilian control over the military.” The only people really making the decisions about America’s wars are across the river from Washington in the Pentagon. They wear uniforms. They have lots of weapons they bought from the corporations they will work for when they retire.
For everyone who supported Obama in 2008, it’s reassuring to find out he understands we have to get out of Afghanistan. But for everyone who’s worried about Obama in 2010, it’s scary to find out that what he thinks should be done may not actually matter. And that’s because he’s not willing to stand up to the people who actually run this country.
And here’s the part I don’t even want to write — and none of you really want to consider:
It matters not whom we elect. The Pentagon and the military contractors call the shots. The title “Commander in Chief” is ceremonial, like “Employee of the Month” at your local Burger King.
Bernie Sanders: Hands Off Social Security
A White House deficit commission is reportedly considering deep benefit cuts for Social Security, including a steep rise in the retirement age. We cannot let that happen. The deficit and our $13 trillion national debt are serious problems that must be addressed, but we can and must address them without punishing America’s workers, senior citizens, the disabled, widows and orphans.
First, let’s be clear: Despite all the right-wing rhetoric, Social Security is not going bankrupt. That’s a lie! The truth is that the Social Security Trust Fund has run surpluses for the last quarter century. Today’s $2.5 trillion cushion is projected to grow to $4 trillion in 2023. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, experts in this area, say Social Security will be able to pay every nickel owed to every eligible beneficiary until 2039. Got that? In case you don’t, let me repeat it. The people who have studied this issue most thoroughly and have no political bias report that Social Security will be able to pay out all benefits to ever eligible beneficiary for the next 29 years. It is true that by 2039, if nothing is changed, Social Security will be able to pay out only about 80 percent of benefits. That is why it is important that Congress act soon to make sure Social Security is as strong in the future as it is today.
Ray McGovern: Obama-Men: Innocents Abroad; Politicos at Home
Paging through Bob Woodward’s “Obama’s Wars,” I should not have been surprised that the index lacks any entry for “intelligence.” The excerpts that dribbled out earlier this week had made unavoidably clear that there was, in fact, no entry for intelligence in the disorderly process last fall that got the Obama administration neck-deep in the Big Muddy-to borrow from Pete Seeger’s song from the Vietnam era.
Before reading through Woodward’s book, the excerpts already published had left doubts in my mind that the Obama White House could be host to such an amateurish decision-process-without-real-process. I had seen a lot of White House fecklessness in my 30 years in intelligence analysis, but it was, frankly, hard to believe that it could be so bad this time.
Could it be true that, after going from knee-deep to waist-deep in the Big Muddy by his early 2009 decision to insert 21,000 additional troops, the President would decide to plunge neck-deep without a comprehensive intelligence review of the impact of the earlier reinforcement and a formal estimate of the likely impact of further escalation.
As it turns out, it was I who was being naïve. I can no longer avoid concluding that a hubris-hewed presidential mix of innocence abroad and raw politics at home slid Barack Obama into a decision that will cost thousands more lives and, in the end, be his political undoing. Add to the mix a heaping tablespoon of, let’s say it, cowardice-and stir.
Robert C. Koehler: Drone Warfare on Trial
Drone warfare – assassination by unmanned aircraft – is arguably one of the most hellish spawns of the modern military-industrial era, and its use is becoming routine in the Af-Pak war, yet (what else is new?) there’s no debate about it at the level of national policy, just a shrug and a void.
The nation’s future is itself on a sort of autopilot. It belongs to the market forces, in tandem with the reckless, short-term strategic interests of the Pentagon and the politics of empire. There’s no moral voice at the core of this system – not even, any longer, a voice of common sense. We live in a spectator democracy: Our role is to gape at the spectacle. The news cycle runs 24/7 and tells us nothing, if the act of “telling” includes in its meaning an invitation to participate.
Ruth Marcus: Look Who’s Killing Jobs Now
Republicans like to denounce President Obama and congressional Democrats for what they describe as “job-killing” policies. But in those red-hot rhetorical terms, congressional Republicans are guilty of mass murder when it comes to job creation.
They left town for their pre-election recess having blocked the extension of a successful jobs program-praised by conservatives from Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour to economist Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute-that provided 250,000 jobs for low-income parents and youths.
A $2.5 billion version of the extension passed the House, twice. The Senate whittled it back to $1.5 billion but still could not dislodge Republican opposition-even though the cost would have been fully paid for.
The program was a sliver of the giant stimulus measure, but one of the most effective in terms of job creation. And it sounded as if it came straight out of the GOP playbook. The money was used overwhelmingly for private-sector jobs. It went to employers, to subsidize-depending on the state-all or part of wages for newly hired workers who would otherwise have been on unemployment rolls or receiving welfare. It was a particular boon to small business, helping them expand at a time when they would not have otherwise had the financial leeway to do so.
Joe Conanson: Lies of the Tea Party
For Americans still suffering from persistent unemployment, falling incomes and rising inequality, politicians of either party probably generate little enthusiasm. Yet although political ennui is understandable, the disaffection and demoralization of Democrats have created a dangerous political vacuum that is being filled with misleading data, urban legends and outright lies.
Indeed, the entire tea party movement was founded on false assumptions about the economic program that probably saved the country from a second Great Depression.
The nascent protests that came to be known as the tea party began as angry populist rants against the Troubled Asset Recovery Program (TARP), that notorious “bailout” of drowning banks and insurance companies, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the “stimulus program.”
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