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”

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Afghanistan’s “Too Big to Fail” Bank Is Failing — Guess Our System Doesn’t Work There, Either

The collapse of Afghanistan’s largest bank will seem familiar to Americans, and so will the upcoming reports of its bailout. We’ve heard the story before: Unheeded warnings. Lax (or nonexistent) law enforcement. An American auditor who said nothing as the books imploded. Sloppy, reckless, and greedy lending. Politicians in bed with banks. And a corporate crime wave led by bankers who can break the law with impunity, knowing they won’t be punished even if they’re caught.

The Kabul Bank story is a sad inversion of nation-building. It might have provided some moments of black humor for the recession-ravaged middle class, if only Americans and Afghans weren’t paying for it with their lives. We promised to teach the Afghans everything we know about running a modern economy.

Apparently we did.

David Sirota: How Money Has Framed the Egypt Debate

The question of why the American government has been so hesitant to push dictator Hosni Mubarak from power is typically answered in our media through the construct of “pragmatism.” If Mubarak leaves, the talking point goes, there could be a new government in Egypt that could threaten “regional stability” with an Iranian-style revolution. This talking point is both bigoted and imperial: It assumes that all Muslims and revolutions are monolithically the same (despite Egypt being Sunni and Arab and Iran being Shiite and Persian), and it assumes that “regional stability” is automatically threatened if a nation exists in the Mideast that isn’t under our thumb.

Nonetheless, the “pragmatism” talking point persists, and thus our government continues to deal with the dictator with kid gloves. But here’s the thing: We’re playing footsie with Mubarak not just because of the self-serving neoconservative construct of “pragmatism” — but also because of cold, hard cash.

Bill McKibben: A Revolution in Our Atmosphere, From Burning Too Many Fossil Fuels

If you were in the space shuttle looking down yesterday, you would have seen a pair of truly awesome, even fearful, sights.

Much of North America was obscured by a 2,000-mile storm dumping vast quantities of snow from Texas to Maine — between the wind and snow, forecasters described it as “probably the worst snowstorm ever to affect” Chicago, and said waves as high as 25 feet were rocking buoys on Lake Michigan.

Meanwhile, along the shore of Queensland in Australia, the vast cyclone Yasi was sweeping ashore; though the storm hit at low tide, the country’s weather service warned that “the impact is likely to be more life threatening than any experienced during recent generations,” especially since its torrential rains are now falling on ground already flooded from earlier storms.

Kristen Breitweiser: Egypt: Skin in the Gam

How absolutely exhilarating to watch the events unfold in Egypt. As I sit with my daughter who has been studying Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia telling her to watch closely since history is unfolding right before our eyes, I can’t help to worry and wonder what impact this will have on our troops that are still fighting in Iraq. Will this affect the complete U.S. troop withdrawal date of December 31, 2011?

Of course the irony is not lost on me.

Nearly 8 long years ago, the Iraq War was wrongfully started under the guise of spreading democracy in the Middle East. And now, I sit and watch real democracy take to the streets of Cairo and Alexandria brought on by — not armies, intelligence officers, and private contractors from misguided nations — but regular, average Egyptian citizens who are simply fed up.

Dick Meister: Ronald Reagan, Enemy of the American Worker

The 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth is coming up in February, and before the inevitable gushing over what a wonderful leader he was begins, let me get in a few words about what sort of a leader he really was.

Ronald Reagan was, above all, one of the most viciously anti-labor presidents in American history, one of the worst enemies the country’s working people ever faced.

Republican presidents never have had much regard for unions, but until Reagan, no Republican president had dared challenge the firm legal standing labor gained through Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt in the mid-1930’s.

Reagan’s Republican predecessors treated union leaders much as they treated Democratic members of Congress – at times, as adversaries to be fought with, and, at others, as people to be bargained with. Reagan, however, engaged in precious little bargaining. He waged almost continuous war against organized labor and the country’s workers from the time he assumed office in 1980 until leaving the presidency in 1988.

Laila Lalami: Winter of Discontent

For those of us who have grown up in dictatorship, the protests that have ignited throughout the Arab world feel like the fulfillment of a great promise. This promise was made to our parents and grandparents, to all those who fought for independence: that we would have the right to decide our future. Instead, our leaders delivered us into a world of silence and fear and told us that we must watch what we say and watch what we do. Our institutions were undermined or dismantled, our political parties were stifled or co-opted, their members disappeared or neutralized. And whenever we looked to the West for help, its presidents and prime ministers spoke with forked tongues, one moment lecturing us on democracy and another offering support to our dictators.

John Nichols: Should the US Suspend Egypt’s $1.5 Billion Aid Package? What About Cutting Military Aid Altogether?

Most Republicans in Congress are supporting President Obama’s tepid and uneven response to the pro-democracy protests in Egypt. No surprise there; the mixed signals sent by the current administration’s have about them the familiar incoherence of the Bush-Cheney years.

But not everyone is cheering on White House and State Department attempts to maintain US influence with an authoritarian regime while talking up democracy and freedom.

Texas Congressman Ron Paul, who broke with Republicans (and many Democrats) to criticize Bush and Cheney, is now breaking with the Washington consensus to object to how Obama is responding. At the root of the maverick congressman and former presidential candidate’s criticism is a broader critique of US policy in the region.

Noting Obama’s maneuvering, Paul complains that “the big fight now is for us to be in charge. If Mubarak survives, we want to be on his side. If they get a new guy, we want to be on [his] side. I just think that doesn’t work because eventually the people rebel. For a while it seemed to be stable, but it’s so artificial.”

Instead of propping up the old dictator or hoping to but influence with the next, Paul argues for cutting aid-particularly the massive military aid packages that pay for a 450,000-man army that “will probably be turned against the people.”

Ari Melber: Malcolm Gladwell Surfaces to Knock Social Media in Egypt

Malcolm Gladwell made many waves — and enemies — with his New Yorker essay doubting the power of social media in political organizing.  “The revolution will not be tweeted,” he declared in October, and the revolutionaries tweeted back, sparking a heated and often predictable debate about the web.  Since then, of course, people in the Middle East have been Doing Things that are more significant than anything one might say to rebut skepticism about web activism and “weak ties.”  On Wednesday, however, Gladwell resurfaced in an apparent response to the idea that digitally networked activists are exceling in Egypt — in contrast to his famous thesis.  Gladwell’s blog post is brief and thin, but it is also important for the ways he gets Egypt wrong.