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”.

Paul Krugman: The Competition Myth

Meet the new buzzword, same as the old buzzword. In advance of the State of the Union, President Obama has telegraphed his main theme: competitiveness. The President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board has been renamed the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. And in his Saturday radio address, the president declared that “We can out-compete any other nation on Earth.”

This may be smart politics. Arguably, Mr. Obama has enlisted an old cliché on behalf of a good cause, as a way to sell a much-needed increase in public investment to a public thoroughly indoctrinated in the view that government spending is a bad thing.

But let’s not kid ourselves: talking about “competitiveness” as a goal is fundamentally misleading. At best, it’s a misdiagnosis of our problems. At worst, it could lead to policies based on the false idea that what’s good for corporations is good for America.

About that misdiagnosis: What sense does it make to view our current woes as stemming from lack of competitiveness?

Robert Reich: The State of the Union: What the President Should Say

The President will have to devote a big part of his speech to the economy, but which economy? Corporate profits are up but jobs and wages remain in the doldrums. People with lots of financial assets, or who are deemed “talent” by large corporations, are enjoying a solid recovery. But most Americans continue to struggle.

In order for the public to understand what must be done, the President has to be clear about what has happened and why. Corporations are profiting from sales of their foreign operations, especially in China and India. Here at home, they’re catering to rich Americans. But an important key to their profits is their reduced costs, especially payrolls. The result has been fewer jobs and lower pay.

Glenn Greenwald: America’s Treatment of Detainees

Amnesty International has written a letter (pdf) to Defense Secretary Robert Gates objecting to the conditions of Bradley Manning’s detention, which was first reported here.  The group denounces the oppressive conditions under which Manning is being held as “unnecessarily harsh and punitive,” and further states they “appear to breach the USA’s obligations under international standards and treaties, including Article 10 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.”  The letter describes Manning’s treatment as particularly egregious “in view of the fact that he has no history of violence or disciplinary infractions and that he is a pre-trial detainee not yet convicted of any offence.”

The letter follows a report from Manning’s lawyer, former Lt. Col. David Coombs, that the conditions of his detention temporarily worsened in the past week, prompting a formal complaint under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.  Amnesty’s letter also follows a report that the U.N.’s leading official on torture is formally investigating the conditions of Manning’s detention, a fact confirmed two weeks ago by The New York Times  (“the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture, Juan E. Mendez, [] said he had submitted a formal inquiry about the soldier’s treatment to the State Department”).  

Of course, caring what Amnesty International or the U.N. have to say about the conditions of America’s detainees is so very 2004.  Now, such a concern is — to borrow a phrase from Alberto Gonazles — a quaint and obsolete relic of the past.

Robert Weissman: Corporate and Congressional Disasters

Corporate crime and wrongdoing is an everyday fact of life in the United States and around the world. Still, the last year has been remarkable for a series of high-profile, deadly corporate disasters: the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe that killed 11 workers and spewed millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the deadly explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine and unintended acceleration of Toyota cars.

You might think that these disasters, singly and together, would impel desperately needed legislative reform. You might think that, but if you did, you would be wrong.

Despite blanket TV and newspaper coverage of the corporate wrongdoing in each case, despite deep public outrage and fear, despite public clamor for action to prevent the same things from happening, Congress has done – exactly nothing.

And the situation is about to get worse.

Maria Sanchez: 14th Amendment outlines Found Fathers’ intentions

I write this in apology to the Chinese and Native American people living in the United States during the 1860s.

Your history is being short-changed. Sorry you’re being maligned by the often raucous and facts-be-damned tenor of immigration debate. But I’m sure you know something about how misplaced zeal can inspire bad law – or in this case, attempts to rewrite the U.S. Constitution.

The goal of some Republican members of Congress today is to undermine the standard of citizenship for every baby born on U.S. soil sealed by the 14th Amendment. The new vision is that the children of undocumented immigrants, the vast majority being Latino, shouldn’t be included.

To drum up support, backers trounce on historical accuracy.

They pitch the idea that when Congress enacted the 14th Amendment in 1868, all they had in mind was rectifying the sins of that post-slavery era. In particular, the need was to address the Dred Scott decision, which said people of African descent could not be citizens.

The claim is that the framers of the 14th Amendment didn’t mean to include the children of immigrants in the citizenship clauses.

Peter Dreier: Glenn Beck’s Attacks on Frances Fox Piven Trigger Death Threats

If anyone thinks that the vitriol that Glenn Beck spews on his radio and TV shows doesn’t stir people to aggressive and hateful action, they should take a look at the postings on his website, The Blaze, about Frances Fox Piven.

For two years Beck has targeted the political science professor as a Marxist Machiavelli whose writings constitute a manifesto for a radical revolution.

But in recent months Beck has escalated his hate campaign against Piven, a professor at the City University of New York, former vice president of the American Political Science Association, and former president of the American Sociological Association. He labeled Piven one of the “nine most dangerous people in the world,” and “an enemy of the Constitution.”

Not surprisingly, this has led to a dramatic rise in ugly threats to the 78-year old Piven.

Jackson Katz: Guns, Mental Illness and American Manhood

A consensus seems to have developed that some in media precipitously and inaccurately blamed violent rhetoric from the right for the shooting in Tucson on January 8. But whether or not they were misled in this instance by what turns out to be false reports about the shooter’s political motivations, something positive did emerge from the media in the wake of this tragedy. Key figures in media promised to “look in the mirror” and examine their responsibility for contributing to a toxic political environment that could lead to violence.

This is a promise to which we should hold the media, regardless of how the event that initially catalyzed it turns out. There is a lot more that journalists and opinion-makers in the media could do to advance a discussion in our society about violence – political and otherwise.

Much of what needs to happen is an honest conversation about issues related to masculinity and violence. Many people have circled around this subject, especially in terms of the intensifying debate about guns. The Tucson massacre has revived debate (for the moment) about our country’s gun laws, and the astounding power of the NRA to block commonsense regulations. Some people go beyond the power of the gun lobby and ask larger questions about our culture, such as MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who asks repeatedly: what’s the obsession with guns? But few if any voices in mainstream media have discussed the connection between guns, violence, and American ideals of manhood.

Russel Simmons: The Night the Lights Went Out at NBC

NBC is a great institution based in the landmark Rockefeller Plaza, where TV and radio began in this country. On Friday night, a bright light was dimmed for no explicable reason, when Keith Olbermann delivered his final show of Countdown on MSNBC. It is being reported that the deal for his removal from the network has been in the works for weeks. Maybe it was someone’s ego; maybe he was too honest and forthright. But I can’t help but feel that the less honest the extreme right-wing is, the more heavily they get promoted; the more honest the progressive voices are, the more they get silenced. This is where Edward R. Murrow’s American media is at today.