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.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

E. J. Dionne: Who Is Sanctimonious?

Washington – What does President Obama think of those who fought and bled to pass his bills in Congress (in some cases losing in this year’s election for their pains) while also defending him against wild charges from the right wing? Are they among the liberals he described as “sanctimonious” who long for the “satisfaction of having a purist position and no victories for the American people”?

Obama’s comments make you wonder: Who does he think he can count on when conservatives try to repeal the health care law, force cuts in programs he supports, investigate his administration down to the last pencil, and continue to denounce him as an un-American socialist?

A senior Obama lieutenant insisted that the president wasn’t attacking liberals. He was responding only to those condemning him as a “sellout” for a tax deal that achieves many progressive goals, at the cost of extending tax cuts for the wealthy and egregiously conceding billions to very rich people who inherit large estates.

Yet simultaneously, the White House was also sending out signals that it was consciously casting the president as a centrist problem-solver in a new iteration of Bill Clinton’s old “triangulation” strategy.

John Nichols: It’s the Estate Tax Exemption, Stupid

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been given a charge from the chamber’s Democratic caucus to negotiate a better tax deal than President Obama got from Senate Republicans.

And Pelosi says she will do just that.

But what’s her “ask”? What’s her credible — and doable — demand?

Pelosi should pull no punches. But, If we assume she cannot get the Republicans or Obama to abandon the absurdly uneven trade-off that defines the deal — a two-year extension of tax cuts for billionaires in return for a one-year extension of basic benefits for the unemployed — then she has to look elsewhere.

For plenty of practical and political reasons, Pelosi can and should start the pushback by focusing on the side deal to renew the estate tax with broad exemptions for millionaires — up to $5 milion for individuals, up to $10 million for couples — and a top rate of 35 percent for the coming two years.

Pelosi has already pointed to the estate-tax agreement as a bone of contention for House Democrats.

“We believe the estate tax in the bill is a bridge too far,” the Speaker has said.

Beverly Bell and Tory Field: “Miami Rice”: The Business of Disaster in Haiti

“We were already in a black misery after the earthquake of January 12. But the rice they’re dumping on us, it’s competing with ours and soon we’re going to fall in a deep hole,” said Jonas Deronzil, who has farmed rice and corn in Haiti’s fertile Artibonite Valley since 1974. “When they don’t give it to us anymore, are we all going to die?”

Deronzil explained this in April inside a cinder-block warehouse, where small farmers’ entire spring rice harvest had sat in burlap sacks since March, unsold, because of USAID’s dumping of U.S. agribusiness-produced, taxpayer-subsidized rice. The U.S. government and agricultural corporations, which have been undermining Haitian peasant agriculture for three decades, today threaten higher levels of unemployment for farmers and an aggravated food crisis among the hemisphere’s hungriest population.

Willaim D. Cohan: A Bankrupt Bargain on Taxes

While Wall Street’s moguls and whiz kids might not want to admit it, the best way to figure out what’s really happening in the economy is to read the daily newspapers. You’ll learn all you need to know there. And the zeitgeist is fairly bubbling these days with an array of stories that seem to be pointing to serious economic trouble ahead. We can no longer ignore the message that is being broadcast loud and clear: We must get our fiscal house in order and take meaningful – exceedingly painful, yes – steps to close the $1.3 trillion federal budget deficit. You can be the most zealous Keynesian economist on the planet and still know that at some point we cannot continue to have both guns and butter without serious repercussions. And we have clearly reached that point.

That’s why the news of the proposed tax-cut deal between President Obama and Congressional Republicans is so distressing. Adding $900 billion to the budget deficit – paid for with more borrowing – is the last thing we need if we want to show the world we are serious about fiscal responsibility. Do we genuinely think that the Chinese, the Japanese and the Persian Gulf oil barons will continue to finance our deficit, except at increasing cost to us?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Treasury Blocks Legal Aid for Homeowners Facing Foreclosure

With the media’s laser-like focus on the Obama-Republican tax deal, here’s a story that’s underreported: the Obama Administration’s coddling of the Big Banks and simultaneous neglect of homeowners facing foreclosure.

Consider this: the recent Fed audit revealed over $3.3 trillion in emergency assistance to the banks and other corporate behemoths during the financial crisis–no strings attached. Two trillion dollars to Morgan Stanley here, $600 billion to Goldman there, throw in a little chump change for McDonald’s, GE, others–no demands to increase lending to small businesses, or modify mortgages for unemployed homeowners, for example.

Then consider the 19 states which are recipients of the Hardest Hit Fund (HHF)–a portion of TARP money set aside to help homeowners in states struggling with the highest unemployment rates and steepest declines in the housing market.

Some of those states, including Ohio, let Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner know as far back as this past spring that they wanted to use some of those funds to assist legal aid groups that help individual homeowners. Seems like a reasonable request–unlike the absurdity of handing over trillions of dollars to robo-signing, foreclosure-mad banks, no questions asked.Treasury solicited the opinion of an outside law firm, Squire, Sanders & Dempsey. Never mind that the firm’s clients include BB&T Corporation and payday lender CNG Financial Corp. The firm said, in essence–sorry, no can do on the legal aid. Not permitted under the TARP.

Huh? Hold on a sec–is this the same TARP that granted the Treasury Secretary all those “extraordinary powers” to protect people’s home values, preserve home ownership, promote economic growth, etc.?

Brian Palmer: Bill Keller, You’re Under Arrest

If publishing the WikiLeaks cables were against the law, could the New York Times go to jail?

Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman says the Justice Department should investigate the New York Times to see if the newspaper can be criminally charged for publishing leaked State Department cables. If federal prosecutors can make charges against the Times stick, whom would they put in jail? . . . .

It might be a mistake for the government even to attempt to prosecute the Times, since the inevitable acquittal would encourage future leakers. California learned this lesson when it tried to prosecute a pornography producer under anti-prostitution laws. After the state lost the case, local police could no longer rely on the plausible threat of a prosecution to cow local pornographers. (Most ordinary people are terrified by the threat of prosecution, even if it’s empty.) While California smut-mongers now roll tape confidently, the other 49 states can still make this threat. That’s why, every time a newspaper publishes classified information, the government rattles its saber but rarely takes any action.

Chuck Collins: Obama Tax Deal Further Concentrates Wealth and Power: Stop the Death Spiral to Plutocracy

In 2010, an essential moral test of a public policy choice is: Does it further concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few?

Or does it disperse concentrated wealth and power ­and strengthen possibilities for a democratic society with greater equality, improved health and well-being, shared prosperity and ecological sustainability?

Does it move us toward Plutocracy or Peace and Plenty?

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, “We can have democracy or concentrated wealth. But we cannot have both.”

By the Brandeis Test, President Obama’s “Tax Compromise” fails. By extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and instituting a significantly weakened estate tax, more wealth will flow into the hands of the richest one percent ­and within that to richest one-tenth of one percent.