“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.
Nouriel Roubini & Michael Moran: Avoid the Double Dip
How Obama can save the fragile economy from going back into a tailspin.
Roughly three years since the onset of the financial crisis, the U.S. economy increasingly looks vulnerable to falling back into recession. The United States is flirting with “stall speed,” an anemic rate of growth that, if it persists, can lead to collapses in spending, consumer confidence, credit, and other crucial engines of growth. Call it a “double dip” or the Great Recession, Round II: Whatever the term, we’re talking about a negative feedback loop that would be devilishly hard to break.
If Barack Obama wants a realistic shot at a second term, he’ll need to act quickly and decisively to prevent this scenario.
Near double-digit unemployment is the root of the problem. Without job creation there’s a lack of consumer spending, which represents 40 percent of domestic GDP. To date, the U.S. government has responded creatively and massively to the near collapse of the financial system, using a litany of measures, from the bank bailout to stimulus spending to low interest rates. Together, these policies prevented a reprise of the Great Depression. But they also created fiscal and political dilemmas that limit the usefulness of traditional monetary and fiscal tools that policymakers can turn to in a pinch.
Paul Krugman: Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? I Only Earn Six Figures
I live in a very sheltered world, yet I know young people just out of college who can’t find employment; men in their late 50s who have lost their jobs and think they will never find another; and families barely scraping by, terrified by what might happen if anyone were to get sick. These days, there are terrible stories everywhere you look.
Yet some Americans who have secure jobs and rather high incomes are feeling very sorry for themselves because it’s possible that they might have to pay somewhat higher taxes next year if the temporary reductions made during President George W. Bush’s tenure in office are allowed to expire for the wealthy.
Take, for example, an unnamed person mentioned in a recent online post by economist J. Bradford DeLong. This person supposedly makes $450,000 a year, has a family of five and after paying bills, loans, taxes and everything else (including private school tuition for three children and the costs of a $1 million house), is left with only a few hundred dollars a month of discretionary income. Mr. DeLong says this person strongly feels that he should not have to pay more taxes – “It is unfair: he is not ‘rich.'”
Robert Reich: 8 Ways to Fight the Right-Wingers and Corporations Buying Off Our Government
What the public wants means nothing if our democracy is secretly corrupted by big money.
Not only is income and wealth in America more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years, but those hands are buying our democracy as never before — and they’re doing it behind closed doors.
Hundreds of millions of secret dollars are pouring into congressional and state races in this election cycle. The Koch brothers (whose personal fortunes grew by $5 billion last year) appear to be behind some of it, Karl Rove has rounded up other multimillionaires to fund right-wing candidates, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is funneling corporate dollars from around the world into congressional races, and Rupert Murdoch is evidently spending heavily.
No one knows for sure where this flood of money is coming from because it’s all secret. . . .
According to FEC data, only 32 percent of groups paying for election ads are disclosing the names of their donors. By comparison, in the 2006 midterm, 97 percent disclosed; in 2008, almost half disclosed.
Last week, when the Senate considered a bill to force such disclosure, every single Republican voted against it — thereby revealing the GOP’s true colors, and presumed benefactors. (To understand how far the GOP has come, nearly ten years ago campaign disclosure was supported by 48 of 54 Republican senators.)
Maybe the Disclose Bill can get passed in lame-duck session. Maybe the IRS will make sure Karl Rove’s and other supposed nonprofits aren’t sham political units. Maybe pigs will learn to fly.
In the meantime we face an election that marks an even sharper turn toward plutocratic capitalism than before — a government by and for the rich and big corporations — and away from democratic capitalism.
Dean Baker: Beneficent Counterfeiters and Economic Stimulus
President Reagan once famously quipped that everyone who supports abortion has already been born. In the same vein it is worth noting that all the policymakers who don’t think we should worry about 9.6 percent unemployment have jobs.
This simple fact cannot be repeated enough times because it explains a huge amount about current economic policy. For the tens of millions of people who are unemployed, underemployed, or have given up looking for work altogether, we are in a crisis. The economy is an absolute disaster, ruining their lives and also jeopardizing the futures of their children and grandchildren.
But that is not the way that the people paid to contemplate economic policy in Washington see things. This gang is busy congratulating themselves because things could have been worse. They point out that if they had been even more incompetent that we could be in a second Great Depression with unemployment staying in the double digits for a decade.
Andrew C. Revkin: Obama’s Haste On Resumed Offshore Drilling
In the face of America’s oil addiction two things seem to fade fast – the wallet shock of gasoline and the political impact of an oil spill, once it’s stanched.
This year’s Gulf of Mexico gusher seemed to pose potent political perils just a few months ago, but all along its significance was blunted by the reality that it did not affect oil or gas prices, which have stayed relatively low. So while it was upsetting for shrimpers, marine biologists and coastal communities, it was really [a yawn for the average American.
That lack of political punch is crystal clear now, as the Obama administration, perhaps hoping to help embattled Democrats at the polls next month, has ended its moratorium on offshore oil drilling for companies that, as the news release headline puts it, clear a “higher bar for safety, environmental protection.”
While the bar may be higher for approvals, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was plainspoken in trying to convey the overall message, saying: “We are open for business.”
Victor Grossman: The European Parliament Condemns the Death Penalty, Expresses Concerns Over Mumia Abu-Jamal
Berlin – What do the USA, China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and North Korea have in common?
The answer may surprise you.
The European Parliament answered this question on October 2nd with passage of a resolution singling out that seemingly disparate list for criticism.
The embarrassing common thread among these six countries: an obsession with putting lots of people to death. The US, its key oil ally Saudi Arabia, its major trading partner China, its targeted enemies of Iran and North Korea, and its puppet ally Iraq all endorse the barbaric state-sanctioned practice of the death penalty, and lead the world in applying that terrible and irreversable sanction.
In a long, detailed EU Parliament resolution, approved almost unanimously by 574 members (only 25 opposed and 39 abstained), the members from all over Europe named people languishing on death rows and threatened with execution in several countries.
That EU resolution specifically highlighted two American death row inmates: Mumia Abu-Jamal in Pennsylvania and Troy Davis in Georgia. Both of these black men were convicted of killing white police officers in trials marred by ineffective defense and gross misconduct by police and prosecutors. The twin defects of ineffectiveness and misconduct are a common feature in many of the three-thousand-plus persons on death rows across America, and especially in the nearly 140 cases that have been overturned thanks to DNA testing or other belatedly discovered proof of innocence.
Martha Rosenberg: Are We Giving Our Soldiers Drugs That May Make Them Kill Themselves?
More soldiers than ever are on drugs that have been linked to suicide and violent behavior.
In 2009 there were 160 active duty suicides, 239 suicides within the total Army including the Reserves, 146 active duty deaths from drug overdoses and high risk behavior and 1,713 suicide attempts. In addition to suicide, other out-of-character behavior like domestic violence is known to erupt from the drugs.
More troops are dying by their own hand than in combat, according to an Army report titled “Health Promotion, Risk Reduction, Suicide Prevention.” Not only that, but 36 percent of the suicides were troops who were never deployed.
The unprecedented suicide rates are accompanied by an unprecedented rise in psychoactive drug rate among active duty-aged troops, 18 to 34, which is up 85 percent since 2003, according to the military health plan Tricare. Since 2001, 73,103 prescriptions for Zoloft have been dispensed, 38,199 for Prozac, 17,830 for Paxil and 12,047 for Cymbalta says Tricare 2009 data, which includes family prescriptions. All of the drugs carry a suicide warning label.
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