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”

Bob Herbert A Terrible Divide

The Ronald Reagan crowd loved to talk about morning in America. For millions of individuals and families, perhaps the majority, it’s more like twilight – with nighttime coming on fast.

Look out the window. More and more Americans are being left behind in an economy that is being divided ever more starkly between the haves and the have-nots. Not only are millions of people jobless and millions more underemployed, but more and more of the so-called fringe benefits and public services that help make life livable, or even bearable, in a modern society are being put to the torch.

Dana Milbank: Obama makes corporate America his business

Conservatives seemed as irked by Obama’s trip to the U.S. Chamber as liberals.

“I strolled over from across the street,” the president said of his trek from the White House across Lafayette Square to the Chamber’s H Street palace. “And look, maybe if we had brought over a fruitcake when I first moved in, we would have gotten off to a better start.”

When the laughter ended, Obama departed from his prepared text to add: “But I’m going to make up for it.”

He sure is – and if the list of goodies he read out Monday is any indication, he would have found it easier to deliver the fruitcake.

Eugene Robinson: The GOP’s selective memory on Ronald Reagan

As we mark the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth, one of our major political parties has become imbued with the Gipper’s political philosophy and governing style. I mean the Democrats, of course.

The Republican Party tries to claim the Reagan mantle but has moved so far to the right that it now inhabits its own parallel universe. On the planet that today’s GOP leaders call home, Reagan would qualify as one of those big-government, tax-and-spend liberals who are trying so hard to destroy the American way of life.

Dennis Kucinich: The Tea Party’s First Test?

The House may vote tomorrow to extend three provisions of the PATRIOT Act and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act that allow the government to conduct domestic surveillance of Americans.

The 112th Congress began with a historic reading of the U.S. Constitution. Will anyone subscribe to the First and Fourth Amendments tomorrow when the PATRIOT Act is up for a vote? I am hopeful that members of the Tea Party who came to Congress to defend the Constitution will join me in challenging the reauthorization.

Dean Baker: If Progressives Wanted to Win

As we mark the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, his most important legacy has gone largely overlooked. Reagan helped to put a caricature of politics at the center of the national debate, and it remains there to this day. In Reagan’s caricature, the central divide between progressives and conservatives is that progressives trust the government to make key decisions on production and distribution, while conservatives trust the market.

This framing of the debate is advantageous for the right since people, especially in the United States, tend to be suspicious of an overly powerful government. They also like the idea of leaving important decisions to the seemingly natural workings of the market.

It is therefore understandable that the right likes to frame its agenda this way. However, since the right has no greater commitment to the market than the left, it is incredible that progressives are so foolish as to accept this framing.

Robert Kuttner: Business Doesn’t Need American Workers

Once again, the job numbers are dismal. In January, the U.S. economy created just 36,000 domestic jobs, far below the roughly 145,000 that economists had forecast. The unemployment rate fell, to 9 percent, but only because more and more discouraged workers are giving up and leaving the workforce.

The U.S. still has a jobs gap of about 14 million jobs, and that number is increasing as the labor force grows. Counting people who’ve given up, or who are working part time when they want full time jobs, the real unemployment number is around 17 percent. America now has about 25 million people either out of work or underemployed.

Meanwhile, corporate profits continue to set records. Profits in the third quarter of 2010 were 1.659 trillion, about 28 percent higher than a year before, and the highest year-to-year increase on record.

What’s going on? Very simply, America’s corporations no longer need America’s workers.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Banking for the People

When you read the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report released last week, it’s hard to believe that not so long ago banks were downright boring. Citigroups, JP Morgans, Bank of Americas, and Morgan Stanleys weren’t peddling worthless mortgage-backed securities so that Masters of the Universe could collect obscene bonuses. Instead-in response to the Great Depression and some common sense regulations-banks were mostly local, single outlets that collected deposits and made sensible loans.

But beginning in the 1970s, bipartisan public policy ushered in a new era of deregulation and consolidation. The argument was that behemoth banks would be safer, more sophisticated and efficient, save consumers money and support economic growth.

For the most damning evidence of just how wrong that argument is check out the lost wealth and wrecked lives of this Great Recession. The statistics on the size and wealth of today’s banks are also very revealing: in 1995, small and mid-sized banks with assets up to $10 billion held 61 percent of all US deposits, today they hold only one-third.  The Giant Banks-with over $100B in assets-had just 7 percent of US deposits in 1995, but today hold 44 percent. And despite the fact that small and mid-sized banks possess just 22 percent of all bank assets today, they nevertheless make a dramatic 54 percent of all small business loans. (In contrast, the largest 20 banks average $380 billion in assets and yet do just 28 percent of small business lending.)

Robert Dreyfuss: Obama Must Reject Neocon ‘Freedom Agenda’

Could Obama have handled the uprising in Egypt better? Yes. Should Obama call for the ouster of Mubarak? No. And does it matter? No. The era of American domination of the Middle East has unraveled, and neither the Egyptian military nor the protesters look to the United States to carry their banner.

However the intense drama in Cairo unfolds-and it may take months, or years, to reach its conclusion- there’s no reason for Obama to embrace the discredited Freedom Agenda of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives. It’s only a matter of time before the authoritarian regime collapses in Cairo, and the revolutionaries don’t need the White House’s help.

Not that the road ahead will be easy.

Laura Flanders: Media Miss the Al Jazeera Story

One of the biggest stories of the past few weeks has been the story of Americans discovering Al Jazeera English. It shouldn’t have been so hard.

As the protest movement in Egypt grew, Americans found that Al Jazeera had what no US network has any more: fully staffed reporting teams working round the clock in Cairo. But other than in a handful of pockets across the United States-including Ohio, Vermont and Washington, DC-cable viewers couldn’t watch Al Jazeera. Some cable operators have blamed political pressure. Others have said they had little time for it.

Ari Melber: Democracy vs. Autocracy in Egypt: Which Side Is the Obama Administration On?

“Now means now,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said when asked about the Obama Administration’s position that the transition to democracy in Egypt must begin immediately.

But over the weekend, “now” turned into some unspecified date in the future, as the Obama Administration backed away from its stance that Hosni Mubarak should resign and Egyptian pro-democracy activists should formally be brought into a transition government.