“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.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
Bill Clinton: We need to save more lives – with less
We risk losing our momentum, unless we find new ways to fill gaps left by reductions in Aids funding caused by the economic crisis
On World Aids Day 10 years ago, as I was preparing to leave office, the world was only beginning to grasp the severity of the Aids crisis. Nearly 36 million men, women and children were living with the disease, but only about 200,000 were receiving the treatment they needed. Funding was nowhere near the levels needed to prevent the disease from reaching pandemic levels.
Over the last decade, we have seen dramatic progress in both treatment and funding. In 2008 alone, $15bn was invested to fight Aids in developing countries, up from $6bn just three years earlier, due in large part to the US Government’s PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief) programme.
Josh Silver: FCC Chairman Announces Fake Net Neutrality Proposal
This morning, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski announced that he will finally seek a vote on President Obama’s top tech issue, “Net Neutrality.” Except for one problem: according to the New York Times, it’s not even close to the real Net Neutrality that President Obama promised the American people.
The Times report, based on an advance copy of a speech the Chairman plans to give today, indicates that the proposed rule is riddled with loopholes, and falls far short of what’s necessary to prevent phone and cable companies from turning the Internet into cable TV: where they decide what moves fast, what moves slow, and whether they can price gouge you or not: a shiny jewel for companies like AT&T and Comcast who have met with the Chairman more than anyone else during the past month, and whose affection he seems to crave more than making good on President Obama’s promise.
Now that the FCC’s proposed rulemaking has been officially announced, it will be deliberated and modified for the next three weeks, leading to a final vote on December 21st.
Nicholas D. Kristof: Haiti, Nearly a Year Later
Ultimately what Haiti most needs isn’t so much aid, but trade. Aid accounts for half of Haiti’s economy, and remittances for another quarter – and that’s a path to nowhere.
The United States has approved trade preferences that have already created 6,000 jobs in the garment sector in Haiti, and several big South Korean companies are now planning to open their own factories, creating perhaps another 130,000 jobs.
“Sweatshops,” Americans may be thinking. “Jobs,” Haitians are thinking, and nothing would be more transformative for the country.
Let’s send in doctors to save people from cholera. Let’s send in aid workers to build sustainable sanitation and water systems to help people help themselves. Let’s help educate Haitian children and improve the port so that it can become an exporter. But, above all, let’s send in business investors to create jobs.
Robert Reich: The Big Economic Story, and Why Obama Isn’t Telling It
Quiz: What’s responsible for the lousy economy most Americans continue to wallow in?
A. Big government, bureaucrats, and the cultural and intellectual elites who back them.
B. Big business, Wall Street, and the powerful and privileged who represent them.
These are the two competing stories Americans are telling one another.
Yes, I know: It’s more complicated than this. In reality, the lousy economy is due to insufficient demand — the result of the nation’s almost unprecedented concentration of income at the top. The very rich don’t spend as much of their income as the middle. And since the housing bubble burst, the middle class hasn’t had the buying power to keep the economy going. That concentration of income, in turn, is due to globalization and technological change — along with unprecedented campaign contributions and lobbying designed to make the rich even richer and do nothing to help average Americans, insider trading, and political bribery.
Jerome Taylor: Crusader for transparency or reckless anti-American? Crusader for trasnsparency or reckless anti-American?
Who is Julian Assange and what does he want? To some, especially in the United States, the Wikileaks founder is a dangerous information anarchist who revels in the chaos he creates and should be treated as an enemy.
Supporters laud the lanky 39-year-old as a champion of transparency – a man who has harnessed the power of the internet
to steal from the information rich and hand it back to the poor. The reality, as always, is probably somewhere in between.
Howard Fineman: Obama’s Naivete on Bipartisanship Has Finally Caught Up to Him
There were some, including some in the media, who listened to President Obama’s account of yesterday’s meeting with Republicans and concluded that there was hope for a surprisingly bipartisan conclusion to the lame duck Congress.
My questions are: what planet do he and they think they are on? And have they paid any attention to Sen. Mitch McConnell?
The president emerged from the meeting yesterday to say, hopefully, that the he had suggested that they work together not just on taxes and spending, but on the other issues pending, including an extension of unemployment insurance.
But at that very moment McConnell and the rest of he GOP Senate leadership were beginning work on a plan to force the Senate to do just the opposite: a unified GOP threat to filibuster debate on anything but taxes and spending.
Johann Hari: China’s Bullying of the Nobel Committee Is a Betrayal of its own Citizens
When the Nobel Peace Prize is presented next week, the stage will be empty and echoing. The winner — Liu Xiaobo — will be 5,000 miles away, in a filthy cell, alone, for the crime of trying to defend his fellow Chinese citizens. As the ceremony unfolds and the prize is not presented, a blindfolded and shackled man will be paraded through the streets of London in a traditional Chinese yoke. He will be a symbol of what the Chinese dictatorship is doing — but there will be an even more powerful and practical symbol in the hall in Oslo. There will be a row of empty seats, for the six countries that have been intimidated and bullied by China into not even attending the ceremony.
The Chinese government wants us to believe that this fight for greater freedom is a Western plot to weaken China. It is the opposite. It is a Chinese plot to strengthen China. Liu is a patriotic Chinese citizen who believes his people should be able to think and speak freely, and, in time, choose their own government. All he has ever done is peacefully advocate that goal — and it has got him an 11 year prison sentence.
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