Punting the Pundits

“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.

Paul Krugman: Hey, Small Spender

Here’s the narrative you hear everywhere: President Obama has presided over a huge expansion of government, but unemployment has remained high. And this proves that government spending can’t create jobs.

Here’s what you need to know: The whole story is a myth. There never was a big expansion of government spending. In fact, that has been the key problem with economic policy in the Obama years: we never had the kind of fiscal expansion that might have created the millions of jobs we need.

Ask yourself: What major new federal programs have started up since Mr. Obama took office? Health care reform, for the most part, hasn’t kicked in yet, so that can’t be it. So are there giant infrastructure projects under way? No. Are there huge new benefits for low-income workers or the poor? No. Where’s all that spending we keep hearing about? It never happened.

Robert Kuttner: Obama Calls the Question on Geithner

By pocket-vetoing the bill that sailed through Congress to expedite mortgage foreclosures, President Obama may have begun a chain reaction that will blow up Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s confidence game with the banks. Let me explain.

In early 2009, Obama and his top economic aides faced a fateful choice: either do an honest accounting of the nation’s big insolvent banks, like Citigroup; or keep propping them up and collude with the banks in camouflaging just how bad things were — and still are.

They opted for camouflage. Geithner and the Federal Reserve devised a “stress test” exercise that avoided an honest accounting of the junk on the banks’ balance sheets; instead they used economic models based on very rosy assumptions about how bad the recession would be. Citi and the others were pronounced basically healthy.

E.J. Dionne Jr.: Shadowy players in a new class war

The 2010 election is turning into a class war. The wealthy and the powerful started it.

This is a strange development. President Obama, after all, has been working overtime to save capitalism. Wall Street is doing just fine, and the rich are getting richer again. The financial reform bill passed by Congress was moderate, not radical.

Nonetheless, corporations and affluent individuals are pouring tens of millions of dollars into attack ads aimed almost exclusively at Democrats. One of the biggest political players, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, accepts money from foreign sources.

The chamber piously insists that none of the cash from abroad is going into its ad campaigns. But without full disclosure, there’s no way of knowing if that’s true or simply an accounting trick. And the chamber is just one of many groups engaged in an election-year spending spree.

Dean Baker  and Sarita Gupta: Memo to the Tax Cut Party — Painful Double-Digit Unemployment Doesn’t Have to Continue

A modest tax on Wall Street financial speculation could raise more than $150 billion a year — money that would go a long way toward funding a serious jobs agenda.

here is a depressing complicity among much of the political leadership about the recession. Many politicians seem prepared to accept that we will have sky-high rates of unemployment for the indefinite future. Projections from the Congressional Budget Office and other authoritative forecasts show the situation improving little over the next few years.

At the moment, this means 15 million people unemployed, 9 million under-employed and millions of other workers who don’t even get counted because they have given up hope of finding a job and stopped looking. It is outrageous that we have this situation. Allowing high unemployment to continue for years into the future is unacceptable.

We know how to get the unemployment rate down.

Jon Walker: Mercenaries Are Only in It for the Money

During the health care fight, the Obama administration would probably have benefited from having a military historian as an adviser. Even a cursory study of military history will show you the important role played for centuries by mercenaries-and it will show you their limitations. There are two critical things to keep in mind when thinking about mercenaries. The first and most important is that they are in it for the money. They are not fighting for ideology, religion, the crown or their motherland. They are in it for the money. The second thing is a dead mercenary can’t collect his pay nor can a defeated nation pay their salary. You simply can’t pay a mercenary to take part in what seems like a suicide mission, you can’t rely on their support if they no longer think you can pay, and they are only loyal as long as the other side doesn’t offer a better deal.

Perhaps Obama’s administration would be better off today if they had kept this in mind when they foolishly thought they could buy the support of the health industries as part of their backroom health care deals. From Politico, we learn the private health care interests that cut sweetheart deals with Democrats haven’t stayed loyal.

 

A new portrait of the health industry landscape has begun to take shape, with some of those major players shifting their dollars from the very Democrats who passed the law they seemingly endorsed at the White House.  . . . .

   Health professionals, bolting from the American Medical Association’s pro-reform position, have become the strongest supporters of the Tea Party Caucus, a coalition of conservative House members aligned with the movement born from a visceral rejection of the law.

   Drugmakers, which invested millions in television advertising last spring and summer to promote passage of the bill, are sitting on their wallets in the run-up to the November elections.

This was just way too predictable. In 2003, Republicans basically tried to buy the support of the health care industry, specifically drug makers, with their massive corporate giveaway in the form of Medicare Part D. Democrats directly campaigned against these deals in 2006 and 2008.

Robert J. Spitzer: President Obama: Veto Yes; Pocket Veto, No!

Mr. President, your October 7 announcement  that you plan to veto a bill that has as its stated, and seemingly unexceptional purpose, of streamlining the recognition of notarized statements across state lines will be welcomed by consumer groups and others who fear that the bill would make it tougher for homeowners to challenge improper foreclosure attempts. And your stated justification — that you “believe it is necessary to have further deliberations about the intended and unintended impact of this bill on consumer protections, including those for mortgages” — expresses a perfectly sensible caution.

But Mr. President, your intention, as repeated in news reports, to employ a pocket veto instead of a regular or return veto, is flat-out wrong, and there are three reasons why.

Robert Creamer: If You Like the Recession, You’d Love “Speaker Boehner”

Last week’s employment report served to reinforce the utter bankruptcy of Republican economic policy — and the absolute necessity of remembering the lessons of the last century of economic history.

The private sector job market is slowly stumbling out of the economic ditch into which it was steered by the policies of the Bush Administration. Sixty-four thousand private sector jobs were created by the economy last month — well short of what is necessary to allow the job market to achieve lift-off velocities and long-term sustained growth — but a least a positive number.

But that growth was entirely offset by the loss of 159,000 government jobs. Some of them were temporary census jobs. But the bulk — including the loss of 26,000 teachers — came from layoffs caused by the fiscal crunch of state and local governments. State and local governments cut jobs at the fastest rate in almost 30 years. The loss in jobs would have been even more massive if Democrats in Congress had not passed a bill to aid state and local government before they adjourned for the August recess. That bill was passed over virtually unanimous Republican opposition.

Krystal Ball: The Next Glass Ceiling

The tactic of making female politicians into whores is nothing new. In fact, it happened to Meg Whitman, one of the world’s most accomplished business women, just last week. It’s part of this whole idea that female sexuality and serious work are incompatible. But I realized that photos like the ones of me, and ones much racier, would end up coming into the public sphere when women of my generation run for office. And I knew that there could be no other answer to the question than this: Society has to accept that women of my generation have sexual lives that are going to leak into the public sphere. Sooner or later, this is a reality that has to be faced, or many young women in my generation will not be able to run for office.

Bill Quigley: Nine Months After the Quake — A Million Haitians Slowly Dying

“If it gets any worse,” said Wilda, a homeless Haitian mother, “we’re not going to survive.” Mothers and grandmothers surrounding her nodded solemnly.

We are in a broiling “tent” with a group of women trying to raise their families in a public park. Around the back of the Haitian National Palace, the park hosts a regal statute of Alexandre Petion in its middle. It is now home to five thousand people displaced by the January 2010 earthquake.

Nine months after the quake, over a million people are still homeless in Haiti.

Haiti looks like the quake could have been last month. I visited Port au Prince shortly after the quake and much of the destruction then looks the same nine months later.

The Associated Press reports only two percent of the rubble has been removed and only 13,000 temporary shelters have been constructed. Not a single cent of the US aid pledged for rebuilding has arrived in Haiti. In the last few days the US pledged it would put up 10% of the billion dollars in reconstruction aid promised. Only 15 percent of the aid pledged by countries and organizations around the world has reached the country so far.

digby: NYC Cops to Get More Powerful Tasers

This post first appeared on Hullabaloo.

I guess they aren’t electrocuting enough mentally ill people to death:

   

Five NYC police precincts are testing a new type of taser today after a the department’s standard-issue taser failed to subdue a knife-wielding suspect and led to a fatal shooting Sunday morning.

   On Sunday, police responded to a 911 call from 24-year-old Emmanuel Paulino. Paulino had told the 911 operator he was “ready to kill some cops,” so they, um, dispatched some cops to his home in the Bronx. Police tried to subdue the knife-wielding Paulino with a taser, but he managed to pull one of the weapon’s prongs out of his body and wound up being shot down after he continued to approach the officers.

   The new taser model – which NY1 says “can even penetrate two inches of clothing” – is lighter and more powerful than the ones cops currently carry.

It’s time for a heart to heart talk. If you are confronted by a police officer give yourself up immediately, do nothing at all to make him angry or believe that you are being uncooperative. Don’t argue or fail in any way to follow his orders to the letter. They have permission to electrocute you for any reason and nobody will do anything about it. You have no rights in practice, only in theory, as long as this is true.