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”.

Jessica B. Harris: Prosperity Starts With a Pea

AT year’s end, people around the world indulge in food rituals to ensure good luck in the days ahead. In Spain, grapes eaten as the clock turns midnight – one for each chime – foretell whether the year will be sweet or sour. In Austria, the New Year’s table is decorated with marzipan pigs to celebrate wealth, progress and prosperity. Germans savor carp and place a few fish scales in their wallets for luck. And for African-Americans and in the Southern United States, it’s all about black-eyed peas.

Not surprisingly, this American tradition originated elsewhere, in this case in the forests and savannahs of West Africa. After being domesticated there 5,000 years ago, black-eyed peas made their way into the diets of people in virtually all parts of that continent. They then traveled to the Americas in the holds of slave ships as food for the enslaved. “Everywhere African slaves arrived in substantial numbers, cowpeas followed,” wrote one historian, using one of several names the legume acquired. Today the peas are also eaten in Brazil, Central America and the Caribbean.

Elizabeth Warren: New Consumer Agency Is Frightfully Necessary — And Late

No one has missed the headlines: Haphazard and possibly illegal practices at mortgage-servicing companies have called into question home foreclosures across the nation.

The latest disclosures are deeply troubling, but they should not come as a big surprise. For years, both individual homeowners and consumer advocates sounded alarms that foreclosure processes were riddled with problems.

While federal and state investigators are still examining exactly what has gone wrong and why, two things are clear.

First, several financial services companies have already admitted that they used “robo-signers,” false declarations, and other workarounds to cut corners, creating a legal nightmare that will waste time and money that could have been better spent to help this economy recover. Mortgage lenders will spend millions of dollars retracing their steps, often with the same result that families who cannot pay will lose their homes.

Second, this mess might well have been avoided if the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had been in place just a few years ago.

Robert Scheer: In Money-Changers We Trust

Two years into the Obama presidency and the economic data is still looking grim. Don’t be fooled by the gyrations of the stock market, where optimism is mostly a reflection of the ability of financial corporations-thanks to massive government largesse-to survive the mess they created. The basics are dismal: Unemployment is unacceptably high, the December consumer confidence index is down and housing prices have fallen for four months in a row. The number of Americans living in poverty has never been higher, and a majority in a Washington Post poll said they were worried about making their next mortgage or rent payment.

In a parallel universe lives Peter Orszag, President Barack Obama’s former budget director and key adviser, who even faster than his mentor, Robert Rubin, has passed through that revolving platinum door linking the White House with Wall Street. The goal is to use your government position to advance the interests of your future employer, and Orszag and Rubin’s actions in the government and then at Citigroup provide stunning examples of the synergy between big government and high finance.

William Pfaff: A Far From Happy New Year

The United States will begin 2011 waging one major war that is now 10 years old and showing serious signs of being lost. Another of its wars, Iraq, has already been lost by the objective standards of who now controls the country and who can be expected to continue controlling it-certainly not the U.S., but Iran, America and Israel’s main enemy in the region. The U.S. has engaged itself in a similar role of combatant in a half-dozen smaller conflicts against self-proclaimed enemy bands in Yemen, the Horn of Africa and western North Africa. . . . . .

The U.S. is entering the new year, and a new age, still with a policy paradigm of aggression, war and global domination in the stubborn belief that the agency for accomplishing its security is to attack religious radicalism in other people’s countries, teach democracy to societies ill-equipped for it and fight nationalist resistance (other people’s nationalism, not America’s). The inevitable result will simply be more aggression, war, reciprocal terrorism, defeat and failure. This promises a far from happy new year!

Dan Collins: Bloomberg’s Blizzard Blunder

When snow falls in much-larger-than-usual amounts, people are inconvenienced, irritated and uncomfortable. The job of elected officials is twofold: 1) Get rid of the snow and 2) Sound sympathetic. The first takes a while, but the second is a no-brainer. Be on the scene and never let anybody sound more concerned than you are about getting things back to normal. Never, ever let the public suspect that you think they’re over-dramatizing their suffering.

As in: Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “The world has not come to an end. The city is going fine. Broadway shows were full last night,” the mayor said in his famous initial response. “There are lots of tourists here enjoying themselves. I think the message is that the city goes on.”

Nononononono.

This has to go down as one of the worst snow responses in political history. Every single sentence is terrible beyond belief. The tourists are happy? Tens of thousands of actual voting residents are stranded. Their cars are buried. Their subways aren’t working. And you’re exulting over the ability of the tourists to get to a Spider-Man preview?

In one day, the Bloomberg mayoralty became a Spider-Man preview itself, thanks to terrible snow politics.

David Sirota: The New York Times‘ Versailles Manifesto

Over the years, we’ve all seen solid examples of the Versailles mentality in our media — ie. the mentality that glorifies Washington and its inhabitants as heroes saving the rest of America from itself. But usually these examples are a bit subtle in how they weave the arrogance into the prose. Usually, you have to really stop and do a careful double-take when you see a piece of Versailles propaganda.

That’s why this recent piece from the notoriously servile Matt Bai in the New York Times is such a groundbreaker. Never have I seen such a monumentally blatant piece of Versailles triumphalism. In that sense, it is truly The Versailles Manifesto.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Will Liberals Learn From Adversity?

And both the liberals and Obama need to escape the bubbles of legislative and narrowly ideological politics and re-engage the country on what can only be called a spiritual level. Modern American liberalism is not some abstract and alien creed. At its best, it marries a practical, get-things-done approach to government with a devotion to fairness, justice and compassion. These sentiments are grounded in the nation’s religious traditions and also in our commitment to community-building that Alexis de Tocqueville so appreciated.

Conservatives talk so much about first principles that they seem to forget how difficult it is to govern effectively. Liberals talk so much about specific programs that they forget how much citizens care about the values that undergird those programs and the moral choices that nurture those values.

In 2010, American liberals should have been cured of any overconfidence. Now, they and the president need to rekindle the hope that this year will be most remembered not for the defeats, but for the first steps taken down a more promising road.