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.

Robert Reich The Perfect Storm

It’s a perfect storm. And I’m not talking about the impending dangers facing Democrats. I’m talking about the dangers facing our democracy.

First, income in America is now more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years. Almost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 percent of Americans.

The top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now earn as much as the bottom 120 million of us.

The perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that’s raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work.

We’re losing our democracy to a different system. It’s called plutocracy.

Dean Baker: Liar Liens and Wall Street’s Foreclosure Scam

The highest rates of foreclosure are on the quick and dirty loans made at the peak of the bubble.

As we all know there is a major philosophical divide in U.S. politics. One the one hand there are those who think it is the role of government to help ensure that the vast majority of the population can enjoy a decent standard of living. On the other side are those who believe the role of government is to transfer as much money as possible to the rich and powerful. The latter group seems to be calling the shots these days.

This is seen clearly in the ” liar lien” scandal: the flood of short order foreclosures that ignore standard legal procedures. The banks have been overwhelmed by the unprecedented volume of defaulting mortgages in the wake of the housing crash. Even under normal circumstances foreclosure rates that in some areas exceed ten times normal levels would create an administrative nightmare.

But these were not ordinary loans. The highest rates of foreclosure are on the quick and dirty loans made at the peak of the bubble. These loans were issued to be sold. Almost immediately after the ink was dry, the issuers would sell these loans off to Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, or other investment banks to turn them into mortgage backed securities. The investment banks themselves were running short order operations. More rapid securitization meant more profits.

Robert Kuttner: Recovery, Please

Will the recession just go on and on and on? In the absence of far more vigorous government action, it certainly looks that way.

At a recent conference sponsored by several think tanks, Paul Krugman declared that the recession could literally continue indefinitely because the economy is stuck in a cycle of depressed wages, reduced consumer purchasing power, damaged banks, and business hesitancy to invest — and no strategy on the political horizon is about to alter this dynamic.

It’s not surprising to hear that from Krugman. The startling thing was that his two co-panelists, former Reagan chief economist Martin Feldstein and the chief economist of Goldman Sachs, Jan Hatzius, agreed that massive stimulus spending was the necessary cure.

Eugene Robinson: If GOP wins, expect more obstruction

I’m cautious about the conventional wisdom that the Democratic Party is about to get flattened by a Republican steamroller. Pollsters are less certain than they’d like you to believe about who’s a “likely voter” and who isn’t. It’s easy to imagine how Democrats, facing near-unanimous predictions of a wipeout, could bestir themselves to narrow the enthusiasm gap by just enough to turn a potential “wave” election into a regular midterm setback for the party in power.

Then again, Democrats might react to the prospect of big losses by pulling the blanket over their heads and going back to sleep. If this happens, Republicans could plausibly win not just the House but the Senate as well. America will have sent Washington a message — and Washington will go on, basically, with business as usual.

The conservatives and Tea Party activists who believe they’re going to fundamentally change the relationship between citizens and their government will become just as disillusioned as the progressives and independents who believed they were fundamentally changing that relationship in 2008. Two years from now, we might well be looking at yet another wave — surging in the opposite direction. Our politics have become tidal.

SarahPosner: Christian Right Insiders Reveal Racism, Virulent Anti-Immigrant Attitudes and Homophobia in Prominent Religious Group

“I’d much rather be working in the secular world than for a ministry,” said the founder’s former secretary, still a conservative and devout Christian. “The secular world is nicer.”

Just before this year’s Values Voter Summit, the progressive advocacy group People For the American Way called  on Republican elected officials and candidates to condemn virulently anti-gay and anti-Muslim statements made by the American Family Association’s director of public policy, Bryan Fischer.

Fischer, who hosts a daily radio show on AFA’s radio network of 180 stations, has, among other things, claimed that inbreeding causes Muslims to be stupid and violent; called for the deportation of Muslims and for banning them from military service; claimed that gay sex is “domestic terrorism”; called gay adoption a “terrible, terrible, inexcusable, inhumane thing to do to children”; and claimed that Hitler and his Stormtroopers were all gay.

Rick Wolff: Another Outrage: Pushing Back Social Security Benefits

In France, millions march against the Sarkozy plan to push the age of eligibility for full retirement benefits from 65 to 67. “We can no longer afford” to pay for workers’ retirements at age 65, Sarkozy says. Similarly, rumors swirl in Washington and beyond that Obama’s special Deficit Reduction Commission is tilting toward similar changes for Social Security here.

What a dishonorable way to “reduce government deficits.” It amounts to reneging on commitments made to working people. For many decades they contributed to Social Security, and made decisions about their savings, expecting and counting on the Social Security retirement age promised to them for all those years.

Sarkozy and Obama don’t consider reducing government budget deficits by taxing business or the rich. That would be “inappropriate in a time of economic crisis,” they say, as if they ever did or ever would support it in any other time.

John Grant: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Think

   Psychoanalysis enables us to point to some trace or other

   of a homosexual object-choice in everyone. … It can be traced

   back to the constitutional bisexuality of all human beings.

   – Sigmund Freud

If Sigmund Freud is right that all humans are “innately bisexual” and if Alfred Kinsey’s research is right that all humans fall somewhere on a bisexual continuum – then it’s clear the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy is a matter, pure and simple, of un-Constitutional repression.

I realize I may not have a very developed appreciation for the nuances of bureaucracy and government. But if one values honesty over repression, this policy just doesn’t make sense.

Alexander The Great, one of the greatest military leaders in history, swung both ways. Lawrence of Arabia was the homosexual military genius instrumental in forming the Sunni-ruled Iraq we invaded and turned upside down in 2003.

Mark Penn: Who Will Win the Midterms?

As we head into the midterms it is increasingly clear that there will be no winners on election night given the massive discontent of the electorate almost across the board. Even if the Republicans have a good night, it will not be an endorsement of the Tea Party any more than 2008 was an endorsement of the progressive left. It will be another cycle in the game of ping pong being played out by an increasingly non-partisan, centrist electorate given too little choice — or, worse yet, given false choices.

The problem is that the successful strategies of the two wings of the parties, particularly as the parties have been shrinking, have driven both parties closer to the extremes. Think about the math of it — if the Republican Party is, say, 26% of the country and the most conservative elements of the party are 14%, then 14% can end up governing not just a minority party but the entire country.

At the root of the discontent is the desire to have practical, not ideological, solutions to intractable problems. In most cases, the voters oppose single-sided solutions that entirely reject one party’s ideas, and favor instead approaches that combine the best of each platform. No, not soft, watered down approaches, but strong, comprehensive solutions such as we’ve seen in the past with the balanced budget accord and Welfare reform.